Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, does the Minister accept that assistance for families consists of more than financial support and that if families can access services early before their difficulties reach crisis point, it can be more cost effective than expensive interventions later? In the light of that, what are the Government doing to encourage children's information services, schools, nurseries and everyone dealing with children to work together to support the hard-to-reach families who, perhaps because of language or cultural barriers, do not know what services are there to help them?

The Lord Bishop of Coventry: My Lords, having spent half-term week with my seven grandchildren, the House will not take it amiss when I say that I am hugely grateful that it is not my full-time job. Given that many parents respect the kinship arrangements within their own families, are the Government exploring ways in which grandparents might be able to update their parenting skills given that there is often a generation gap?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
	I welcome Peers to this debate on this important Bill. I look forward to a fruitful debate that reflects the considerable expertise on this subject in your Lordships' House. The purpose of the Bill is to provide an alternative legislative mechanism to Bill procedure for the Government to deliver swiftly those better regulation initiatives that are not highly controversial. Business and other organisations tell us time and again that they need there to be such an alternative procedure. The CBI, for instance, in a statement made yesterday, considers that the Bill provides the right structure for quick regulatory reform of unnecessary or over-complicated regulation and a risk-based approach to the making and enforcement of regulation. Miles Templeman, director-general of the Institute of Directors, and representatives from the British Chambers of Commerce and the Forum of Private Business have told me and other Ministers in person that they want this Bill and they want this Bill to deliver.
	The Bill is but one part of a much wider, more ambitious government agenda to effect real change in the UK's regulatory environment, and it must be considered within that broader context. Therefore, in opening this debate, I will provide noble Lords with some of the broader context before setting out the main provisions of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.
	I am most grateful for the constructive reports on the Bill by both the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, and his committee, and the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, and his committee. We welcome the conclusion of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee that the order-making powers in Clauses 1 and 2 are not inappropriate. We note the committee's strongly held view that implementation of Law Commission recommendations by order is not appropriate. I shall return to that issue later, but I assure noble Lords that the Government will consider it very carefully and will continue to listen to noble Lords' views on this and other matters. As always, these committees have provided lucid and comprehensive reports in a very short space of time. I am sure that these reports will be an invaluable aid to our deliberations today and throughout the passage of the Bill. The Government will consider the recommendations made in the reports very carefully.
	The Government have already demonstrated their willingness to listen in another place. It is essential that we achieve the right balance in this Bill between effective powers and the appropriate parliamentary scrutiny of any order. I very much look forward to hearing the views of noble Lords today on how that can best be achieved.
	Noble Lords will agree that it is of crucial importance for the continued competitiveness of this country that any Government pursue as many measures as possible to ensure that regulation is kept to an absolute minimum so that businesses—multinationals and small businesses—as well as the public and voluntary sectors can concentrate their efforts where they add most value. The United Kingdom is one of the best places in the world to do business. Independent surveys consistently place the United Kingdom high in any ranking table of competitiveness. For instance, a survey by the World Bank published in September 2005 rated the United Kingdom second in the EU and ninth in the world for best business conditions. This and other independent reports show that the United Kingdom is doing well, but in a cut-throat global economy with emerging markets full of youthful vigour it is essential for all United Kingdom citizens that we ensure that the UK retains its competitive edge.
	This Government have acknowledged that more needs to be done to change the actual culture of regulation across Government. In the March 2005 Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, therefore, set out a radical programme of reform to reduce regulatory burdens. That radical programme of reform includes the acceptance in full of the recommendations made in the report by Philip Hampton, chairman of J Sainsbury plc, on how to deliver effective regulatory inspection and enforcement, as well as those recommendations in the Better Regulation Task Force's report Less is More, which recommended ways to control the development of new regulations. The report also urged the Government to complete the review of the Regulatory Reform Act 2001, with particular reference to the need to improve the delivery of non-controversial proposals for simplification. The Bill is of course the result of the consultation and review of that Act, which was carried out last year.
	The Government's radical reform agenda tackles onerous regulation in a number of other innovative ways. The Government are committed to measuring and reducing what it costs business in time, money and effort to comply with particular regulations in their Administrative Burden Reduction Project. Once the burdens have been identified and quantified, every government department and regulator will set targets to reduce them. Final targets should be announced around the time of the 2006 Pre-Budget Report. The outcome of this work and the concerted push across government departments for better regulation will be reflected in concrete simplification plans containing specific deregulatory measures from each government department to be published later in the year.
	Further initiatives that contribute to the Government's strategic commitment to reduce red tape include a new website, launched in September 2005, allowing stakeholders to submit electronically regulatory reform proposals, a number of which have been taken forward by government departments. The website is only one of the routes through which stakeholders can submit proposals. Over 270 proposals have been received of which, after careful consideration, so far 28 have been taken forward by departments.
	The initiatives also include an independent review led by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Davidson QC, investigating the transposition of European regulation into the UK and whether "goldplating" needs to be addressed more rigorously. An interim report will be published next month.
	In addition, Richard Macrory, professor of environmental law at University College, London is conducting a review to consider options for the reform of regulatory sanctioning regimes.
	There are also the regulatory impact assessments, under which government departments and regulators must assess the total cost of any proposed future legislation for their potential impact on those who will be affected it.
	It is in the context of those and other wide-ranging and entirely novel initiatives that this Bill must be considered. The Bill, therefore, is intended to be one of a number of mechanisms for turning the aims of better regulation into reality for the end users on the ground—those in business who create wealth and jobs in our economy and those in our public services and in voluntary and charitable organisations who work to improve the lives of our citizens. If we deliver on those better regulation objectives, the benefits will be considerable. The Better Regulation Task Force has estimated that we could boost British national income in the long term by as much as 1 per cent a year.
	The UK is not alone in its effort to deliver wholesale reform and instil a real culture change in regulation. The Dutch are far advanced in reducing regulation and have already reaped substantial benefit to their economy. And, as noble Lords will be aware, following in particular the recent debate on the excellent report by the European Union Committee, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, better regulation is also a priority for the European Union. The Commission has dropped more than 65 proposed pieces of legislation and has undertaken to simplify up to 1,400 individual pieces of Community legislation, with the aim of lightening the burden of EC legislation. This Government and other member state Governments continue to support and encourage the Commission and the European Parliament further to pursue such better regulation initiatives.
	After that somewhat lengthy bit of scene-setting, I will turn to the specific ways in which the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill will contribute to that culture change in regulation across government.
	The Bill before us now is not the one that noble Lords may have heard about with concern when it was first introduced in another place. The Bill has been amended substantially by the other place. Most significantly, the Bill now contains powers that are focused clearly on delivering better regulation initiatives.
	The Bill will replace the Regulatory Reform Act 2001. That Act has made some real difference, but it has fallen short of the hopes that were established when it was created. There have been fewer orders than expected, both generally and in relation to the implementation of Law Commission recommendations in particular.
	I believe that the Bill before the House will be more fit for purpose than the order-making power in the 2001 Act has proved to be. In broad terms, that is because the rationale for using the better regulation powers will be focused on practical outcomes, including on removing or reducing the burdens of financial costs, administrative inconvenience, or obstacles to efficiency, productivity or profitability.
	Part 1 of the Bill contains three order-making powers. They will not be the appropriate or even necessary mechanism for every single better regulation initiative, but in many instances they will provide real tools, where appropriate, for departments to pursue their ambitious plans for removing unnecessary regulatory burdens without having to compete for precious time on the Floor of this House.
	Better regulation initiatives that the order-making powers will allow us to deliver include: the reduction or removal of administrative burdens such as form filling or information-giving requirements; ensuring that inspection is risk-based to reduce the burden on those who comply with regulation, and concentrate inspection on those who do not; simplifying and making more transparent and less onerous the ways in which people and businesses need to apply for consent from public authorities; the exemption in certain key instances of small and medium enterprises, charities and others from burdensome regulation to allow them to concentrate their effort where it is most needed; ensuring that regulatory activities are carried out in a way that is transparent, accountable, proportionate, consistent and targeted only at cases in which action is needed; the delivery of mergers to the extent that they reduce burdens by, for example, reducing the burden on the regulated who are currently on the receiving end of multiple inspections by different regulators; and finally, of course, the delivery of Law Commission recommendations.
	These are wide powers. The Government have no intention to use them inappropriately but understand the importance of defining when they could be used. The Government have therefore included on the face of the Bill stringent safeguards for the use of the order-making powers. As I shall explain, these safeguards will ensure that the order-making powers will not be used in an inappropriate way.
	One of the most important safeguards in the Bill is the power for relevant committees in either House to veto orders. The veto is linked to the purpose of the powers and the preconditions for their use. The Government have noted the recommendation in the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee that the veto should be exercisable on any grounds. We have also noted the Select Committee on the Constitution's view that allowing relevant committees in either House to veto orders on any grounds would strengthen parliamentary procedures appropriately.
	As we said in another place, the Government want to get all procedures for parliamentary scrutiny of draft orders right. We have said that we would continue to listen about how best to achieve this. Having listened and having spoken to a number of committee chairmen in another place, I am pleased to announce to noble Lords that the Government accept the view of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the Select Committee on the Constitution and are content to remove from the face of the Bill the criteria for use of the veto. I am confident that this power of committee veto on any grounds will still allow the Government to work together with relevant committees in both Houses to deliver the reform for which orders are intended.
	However, I urge noble Lords to accept that we must always keep uppermost in our minds the fact that the order-making powers and the procedures for their use must work in practice to deliver real regulatory change on the ground. In suggesting amendments, I urge noble Lords not to lose sight of the overarching, practical objective of the Bill: that the order-making powers must deliver regulatory reform.
	The CBI has made very clear the need for this balance between due parliamentary procedure and the ability to deliver better regulation. In a statement made yesterday, it urged parliamentarians debating the Bill not to lose sight of its intended outcome—for an elected Government to be able to deliver more and swifter deregulatory measures for the benefit of business and society at large.
	The Bill includes a number of other stringent safeguards to ensure that the order-making powers in Part 1 are used only for those initiatives that are appropriate. These safeguards consist of rigorous preconditions that must be met before an order is made, as well as requirements that proposals must be subject to public consultation and rigorous parliamentary scrutiny procedures that should apply before an order can be made.
	The preconditions in the Bill state that an order can be made only if the Minister considers the following: that the policy objective cannot be satisfactorily attained without legislation; that the order is proportionate to its aim; that the order strikes a fair balance between the public interest and the interests of anyone adversely affected by it; that the order does not remove any necessary protection; and that the order does not remove any right or freedom that persons might reasonably expect to keep.
	In addition, I can reiterate two key government undertakings: that the Government will not deliver highly controversial measures by order and that we will not force through orders in the face of opposition from the parliamentary committees. There is also the substantial safeguard that orders may not remove a burden falling only on a Minister or government department unless it affects the Minister or department in the exercise of a regulatory function. Examples of the latter are the pesticides directorate, which is part of Defra, or Companies House, which is part of the DTI, each of which exercise regulatory functions. This guarantees that the Bill cannot be used to remove core functions from government, such as the provision of free education or healthcare, simply because they impose a financial cost on government.
	Finally, the Bill precludes the order-making powers in Part 1 from amending the Human Rights Act or Part 1 of the Bill itself.
	Before I turn to other parts of the Bill, there are three specific areas in relation to Part 1 on which I should like to comment briefly: the ability to confer by order the power of legislating; the implementation of Law Commission recommendations; and the effect of the Bill on the constitutional convention whereby Parliament does not legislate on matters internal to the Church of England without its consent.
	As the Government also made clear in another place, we acknowledge the view, which has since also been expressed in the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report, that further discussion is necessary to consider options to restrict the ability of certain orders to confer the power to legislate on any person.
	None of us doubts that the Law Commissions do excellent work, but all of us know that their work is often not implemented quickly. This problem is long-standing and has not gone unnoticed. As long ago as 1993, the Hansard Society described Law Commission Bills as probably among the most carefully prepared of all Bills: these legislative cakes are properly baked. Conflicting views have usually been reconciled and objections overcome. Therefore, unless they arouse opposition on political, moral or social grounds, they should be ready for a simple passage into law.
	There has of course been some progress in implementing Law Commission recommendations. Parliamentary procedures, such as the Special Public Bill Committee—the Jellicoe committee—have been developed. However, these have not provided a really effective means of breaking the backlog of unimplemented reports. That was recognised by John Halliday in his quinquennial review of the Law Commission in 2003. He recommended that the search for procedural reform to implement Law Commission recommendations should not be abandoned. The Government have acted on that recommendation. We have consulted on the proposal that there should be an order-making procedure for implementing Law Commission recommendations. The outcome of the consultation was favourable.
	Of course, we accept that some Law Commission recommendations are not suitable for anything other than a full Bill procedure, such as, for example, the commission's recent report on cohabitation. We believe that the veto and the other safeguards in the Bill provide adequate controls over the possible misuse of this power. We have, however, noted the serious reservations—

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I thought I had made it clear that that was not the intention of the Bill. Perhaps if the noble Earl follows the debate and the rest of my comments, that will be clear. I also suggest that he reads Hansard very carefully to follow the line of our argument.
	Perhaps I may continue on the subject of the Law Commission. We have noted the serious reservations entered by the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, and his committee about Clause 3. We have also noted the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Holme, and his committee. This is, no doubt, an area that will occupy a considerable part of our debates and it is right that it should. Our aim is to find practical ways to bring the benefits of Law Commission recommendations to citizens and businesses, whether by the proposed order-making procedure or otherwise. We will of course work with parties opposite to try to achieve that end.
	I suspect that we will spend a good deal of time on Clause 3. I know that some noble Lords find it objectionable in principle, but I urge them to be pragmatic and to work with us to achieve a result that will deliver the real benefits of appropriate Law Commission recommendations to the widest possible group of people and businesses in the shortest practicable time. We will, as we have done throughout the course of the Bill in another place, listen carefully to the views expressed by noble Lords on this and other issues.
	Finally, on Part 1, I would like to make it clear that the Government are also mindful of the longstanding constitutional convention in relation to the Church of England, whereby Parliament does not legislate on matters internal to the Church without its consent. We will, of course, uphold that convention and we will make that explicit in the Bill where necessary.
	Part 2 of the Bill enshrines in statute five principles to which a person must have regard when exercising those regulatory functions that are specified by order. The principles are the Better Regulation Commission's five principles of good regulation, and provide that regulatory activities must be carried out in a way that is transparent, accountable, proportionate, and consistent, and that they should be targeted only at cases in which action is required. Those principles are widely regarded as the gold standard for judging regulation not only by government departments, regulators and organisations in the UK, but also in several other countries, including Ireland and Germany.
	Given the variety of functions that regulators have and the variety of contexts in which they operate, inconsistency of approach is a real risk and can cause difficulties for those regulated. We would therefore like to set a baseline standard for regulatory work and these principles support the Government's aim of bringing about risk-based, proportionate and targeted regulation.
	This part of the Bill also enables a Minister to issue and revise a code of practice which sets out the best practice for regulators. The duty to have regard to a code of practice when a regulator develops his policies will ensure that the good practice in the code effectively filters through to the regulator's activities, whether planning inspections, preparing a strategy on advice, or allocating resources between different regulatory functions.
	I am confident that, through the principles of good regulation and a code of best practice for regulators, we will deliver on our commitment to promote effective, risk-based enforcement which will make a real difference on the ground to those who are regulated, without compromising the UK's excellent regulatory outcomes that make this country such an attractive place for international business.
	The provisions in Part 3 will make it much more straightforward for Ministers and departments to transpose EC regulations and to keep domestic legislation implementing Community law up to date, as well as making it easier for organisations and individuals to understand and work with these changes. Part 3 concerns only the transposition of EC regulation into UK law. The provisions make no changes to the policy made by the European institutions in Brussels and will not lead to an increase in regulation.
	I want to leave noble Lords in no doubt that we need this Bill. Business needs the Bill; our dedicated public servants need the Bill; and our hard working voluntary and charity workers and citizens need the Bill. Miles Templeman, director-general of the Institute of Directors, John Cridland, deputy director-general of the CBI, and representatives from the British Chambers of Commerce and the Forum of Private Business have, on several occasions, told me, in person, and other Ministers, that they want this Bill to deliver. The Bill is an important mechanism in maintaining our country's competitiveness, in safeguarding our economic prosperity, in reducing burdens on public services and in improving the lives of all citizens. I commend the Bill to the House.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Bassam of Brighton.)

Baroness Wilcox: My Lords, as the Minister has said, this Bill has arrived in this House in a considerably better state than when it arrived in the other place. We on these Benches are grateful to the Government for listening to the concerns voiced by many parliamentarians, led by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who warned that the wide-ranging powers initially proposed in the Bill would far exceed the bounds of what would be constitutionally acceptable to this House. As a result of the concessions that the Government made in the other place, we now have what is tantamount to a fresh Bill to be considered by your Lordships' House. The other place had precious little time to consider the new government amendments, and some parts of the Bill received little or no attention at all, so the onus is all the more on this House to scrutinise it extremely carefully.
	The House will do that against a background of the deepest suspicion about where the Government are coming from. If the Bill team had spent a fraction of the time on deregulation that they spent on constructing the Bill and then pulling it to pieces, right now we would be much better off. Deregulation comes down to, "Don't just talk about it; get on and do it". The trouble is that this Government just do not do that. Removing burdens from business is critical if this country is to retain a competitive edge over other countries in today's globalised economy.
	I cannot help but feel rather circumspect about whether this Bill really signifies a new dawn of deregulation from this Government. It is all very well producing a mechanism to deregulate, but unless that is accompanied by a fundamental change of culture in Whitehall departments to reduce the amount of new regulations produced, it will achieve very little. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and since 1997 the pudding cooked up by this Government has got bigger, heavier, stodgier and terrifyingly more costly every year.
	Since 1997 we have heard about the launch of the Better Regulation Task Force, regulatory impact assessments, the Chancellor's Better Regulation Action Plan and the establishment of the Better Regulation Executive. One can produce as many initiatives as one likes, but the measure of success is proved only by the effect on the ground. The British Chamber of Commerce's burdens barometer estimates that the cost of new regulations introduced on business since 1997 now totals £50 billion, up from £39 billion a year ago. On average under this Government, regulations are introduced at the rate of 15 a day, a far higher rate than under the previous Government.
	The World Economic Forum says Great Britain has fallen from fourth to 13th in the list of the world's most competitive countries. When you talk to the business community, particularly small businesses, it is clear that the burden of regulation is one of the main problems it has to contend with when trying to maintain its competitiveness. When on average something in the region of 3,800 regulations are passed annually, one can see that deregulation is only a small part of the equation. The real solution lies in cutting down the amount of regulation produced in the first place.
	As Sir David Arculus said last December when he stood down as chairman of the Better Regulation Task Force:
	"Bad regulations are like moles on the lawn . . . While you are dealing with one, a dozen more are appearing behind your back. The best way to stop bad regulation . . . is to dig down to the root of the problem".
	He also highlighted the huge cost of regulation, which he said exceeds £100 billion. He estimated that a third of that was probably administrative costs. It is encouraging that the Government accepted his recommendation that they should embark on a project to measure the administrative costs of regulation and set up a public target for reducing them. I would welcome an update from the Minister on how far that work has progressed.
	I have always felt that this Government purposefully learnt the language of business to win the election, but that they have never understood its heartbeat. Creating initiatives and setting up the statutory structures for quick regulatory reform of over-burdensome regulations looks good—and no doubt gives the Minister something tangible to go back to the Prime Minister with, to show that his department is "delivering"—but I suspect it is far harder, and perhaps beyond the reach of statute, to actually get into the weeds of every department and change the culture of regulation. That is down to the managerial and political determination of the individual Minister.
	Every Minister should have on his desk a sign saying, "Just say no"; it is allowed, and it is possible. Civil servants are quite right to advise that there may be risks, but it is for a good Minister to see the dangers and have the real political wisdom of trusting to common sense and leaving some things well alone. Perhaps if the Government had focused more on the internal processes and administration of their departments rather than churning out headline-catching legislation, they would not have found themselves in the mess they are in now with the Home Office and the National Health Service.
	I have concentrated so far on the effect on business of over-regulation because the Bill at least presents a step in the right direction towards delivering a lighter regulatory burden on business, and we must not lose sight of that. However, its potential to deliver more and swifter deregulatory measures is hard to gauge. It would be useful to hear from the Government during the forthcoming debates on the Bill some concrete examples of which regulations they would like removed. We have had 44 government Bills this Session. How many of them have deregulated? How many regulations have gone? Every one of those Bills could have had a whole part devoted to deregulation and, at least, both Houses could have amended and improved them. It would also be useful to get some confirmation of the numbers of regulatory reform orders that the Government envisage would be passed under the new order-making powers of the Bill. Under the Regulatory Reform Act 2001, the Government seem to have managed only about 28, according to the figures in their regulatory impact assessment to the Bill published today. That was despite a far higher target being set. We wait with anticipation to hear what the new targets will be, once Ministers have these new powers.
	If we apply a cost benefit analysis to the Bill, its potential benefit and effectiveness are hard to predict, since they are reliant on the political will of Ministers to take advantage of the Bill's powers and use them effectively. But the cost in constitutional terms is easier to see: the Bill risks reducing the ability of Parliament properly to scrutinise measures that will amend primary legislation. The constitutional risks of the Bill are now somewhat reduced, but having removed the sting from the Bill, some of the poison still remains. We agree with the view expressed by the Select Committee on the Constitution at paragraph 45 of its report that,
	"additional safeguards can be introduced to protect matters of constitutional importance without undermining the policy goals of the bill".
	In particular we hope to examine carefully, to see whether we can improve, the parts of the Bill that define the operation of ministerial power and permit the sub-delegation of power.
	Very weighty concerns have been raised about the potential application of the Part 1 order-making powers to the principal economic regulators—that is, the ones with the greatest powers in energy, telecommunications and broadcasting, water and railways—and the overall competition authority, the Office of Fair Trading. Part 2 sets out principles that should be adhered to when a person exercises regulatory functions. It then specifically excludes the principal economic regulators. That is right, because the principal economic regulators already adhere to and espouse all the principles that Part 2 seeks to promote. Part 2 is for the smaller, less significant regulators, and that is how it should be.
	But the rightful exclusion of the principal economic regulators from Part 2 throws into sharp relief the fact that they have not been excluded from Part 1. Yet Part 1 is by far the more significant part. It allows the Minister, after cursory and highly abbreviated parliamentary procedure, to alter by administrative fiat fundamental parts of the constitutions of the principal economic regulators. As was pointed out last week by the chairman of the Office of Rail Regulation, Part 1 could be used to diminish or even extinguish the independence of the principal economic regulators. It could also be used to alter their jurisdictions, for example by transferring critical parts of them to other non-independent—that is, politically controlled—agencies of the state.
	This is no idle or academic point, and the adverse consequences of the use of such powers may be very significant. It happened—or rather, it very nearly happened—when the Government found in 2001 that, to carry out their plans to put Railtrack into administration, they had to contend with the independence and jurisdiction of the Rail Regulator, the statutory predecessor of the Office of Rail Regulation. I need not remind the House of those events, but the political determination to destroy the independence of the regulator was firm and we should always remember that.
	What this regrettable and disgraceful incident shows is that a Government—this Government—could and did manifest their intolerance of the independence and jurisdiction of one of the essential supports of a privatised industry in this way. The then Rail Regulator published his commentary on this Bill in an article in the Financial Times in March this year. He referred to the threats of neutralising legislation in these terms:
	"When in 2001 the then Transport Secretary improperly threatened me with legislation to remove my independence as Rail Regulator, it was the rigour and timescales of the Parliamentary process which offered the most potent protection. He simply could not do it in time, and had to resort to other equally controversial measures to get his way in the collapse of Railtrack. If the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill had been enacted at that time, the juggernaut of executive government would have had considerably more power to be rid of an inconvenient part of the constitution".
	This is a very significant issue. Private investors depend heavily on those regulators being beyond political control, taking decisions on the companies' investment programmes, price controls, access to their networks and so on against objective public interest criteria set down in their founding statutes, without regard to ministerial intervention or short-term political whims. Investors know that if their regulators' roles, statutory duties or constitutional positions are to be altered, such a fundamental change must first go through the full process of parliamentary scrutiny and be properly and openly debated. They know that something so great in its significance cannot be steamrollered through, and that the ambitions of a control-obsessed Executive can and should be tested and checked in a considered and proportionate way. That is how it should be. We should never allow it to be otherwise.
	The Government are well aware of the Official Opposition's concerns about the provisions relating to the implementation of Law Commission proposals. The Government blame the lack of legislative time to get Law Commission proposals on to the statute book. But ultimately that is a problem of the Government of the day's priorities and not necessarily a reason to sacrifice proper parliamentary scrutiny of any proposals introduced by primary, rather than secondary, legislation.
	There are other lingering doubts over the order-making powers in Part 1, for example whether they are appropriate for consolidatory and codifying measures. In this matter and indeed on the whole question of the appropriateness of the proposed powers in Part 1, this House will find the 20th report of the Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform an invaluable guide. I feel that it is right to give notice to the Government that we shall pursue its comments in Committee.
	There are further concerns about the procedure contained in Clauses 13 to 19, by which any order is approved by Parliament. We will look to ensure that these orders are guaranteed the correct scrutiny they deserve by Parliament, and whether the so-called veto, which is in fact a mere recommendation, that can be exercised by a committee over a draft order is strong enough. I welcome the Minister's indication that the Government will accept the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee regarding fettering the discretion of the committee to consider a draft order. We hope the Government will go further and accept all its recommendations.
	Part 3 relates to the implementation of European Community obligations. We will examine carefully whether more can be done to limit the practice of gold-plating in the implementation of European regulations and directives. I am sure that the Government and the Opposition both agree that regulations should contain no more than is absolutely necessary when implementing EU directives, and I would be interested to hear from the Government what steps they suggest to achieve this.
	In conclusion, we support attempts by the Government to ensure that deregulation can be achieved swiftly and efficiently. We owe it to the economic well-being of this country to get the regulatory culture of Whitehall changed for the better, and if this Bill proves to be a useful tool to achieve that so much the better. But the right balance has to be struck between achieving those aims and ensuring that Parliament still maintains effective scrutiny and control of any draft orders introduced by Ministers. The Bill is not yet in a fit state to be passed by this House, but we hope that the Government will continue to listen so that by the time it leaves here, it will do so as a constitutionally sound but effective deregulatory weapon.

Lord Goodhart: My Lords, the Government apparently originally thought that this Bill would be straightforward and uncontroversial. On first publication, it seemed that many people agreed. There was certainly no great initial reaction from the Official Opposition in the House of Commons. They seemed to have thought that deregulation was a good thing, that this Bill was about deregulation, and therefore that this Bill must be a good thing. It was only when my honourable friends in the House of Commons, Mr David Heath and Mr David Howarth, pointed out the dangers implicit in the Bill as it then stood that the Conservatives sat up and took notice, for which I am glad. It took very much longer for the Government to accept that the Bill had real problems.
	All through Committee in the House of Commons, the Government insisted that the Bill did not need serious alteration. It was only on Report in the Commons that they accepted that big changes were needed. Probably even then that was only because the government Chief Whip in your Lordships' House told them that they would not get the Bill through this place. The changes introduced by the Government at that stage altered the Bill from being wholly unacceptable to a Bill that is acceptable in principle but still in need of major surgery. The Bill allows primary legislation to be removed, amended or even created by secondary legislation. That power needs to be kept under very close controls. It is of course true that, in doing this, the Bill is not doing something entirely new. The process began with the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994, which was replaced and extended by the Regulatory Reform Act 2001. I was a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee at the time and also spoke from these Benches when the then Bill went through your Lordships' House, so I can remember it very well; it was fairly controversial.
	I accept three propositions. First, it is useful to have a system by which technical and uncontroversial amendments can be made to Acts of Parliament without taking up parliamentary time by primary legislation. If there were no such system, desirable amendments would be delayed or not made at all. Secondly, I accept that the Government have not up to now attempted to abuse their powers under the 2001 Act. Only in one case has the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee reported that the Act was being used inappropriately. In that case, the Government withdrew the draft order. However, your Lordships' House cannot of course assume that the present Government, or still less any future Government, will never abuse the powers. We cannot allow this Bill to go through on that basis.
	Thirdly, I also accept that the Regulatory Reform Act has not proved as useful as was hoped. By the end of 2005, only 27 regulatory reform orders had been made against a government target of 60. The reasons for that are not clear. It may be in part because procedures under the 2001 Act are cumbersome. It may be because some restrictions in the 2001 Act have made it difficult or impossible to use the regulatory reform procedure for what may be regarded as legitimate purposes. I accept therefore that it is arguable for some extension of powers under the 2001 Act to be made, and we do not oppose this Bill in principle. However, to begin with we need an explanation of why this result could not be achieved simply by making amendments to the Regulatory Reform Act 2001 rather than by an entirely new Bill to replace it.
	Turning to the content of the Bill, I believe that we must remove the special provision for Law Commission Bills. I speak as a great admirer of the work of the Law Commission and I am fully aware of the backlog of useful reform proposals waiting enactment for years, and sometimes never going through. Originally I thought that Clause 3 would provide a reasonable way of enacting Law Commission reforms more quickly and that the clause would become acceptable if any differences between the order and the Law Commission proposals had to be approved by the Law Commission itself. I am now persuaded that this view is wrong. It is wrong in principle for orders to be used to create new primary legislation by a process which does not admit to amendments being made during its passage through Parliament; Clause 3, of course, does exactly that. It does not matter that the proposal came originally from the Law Commission rather than from the Government. If the Law Commission proposal creates new legislation, I believe that the reform order procedure is wrong in principle. If the proposal merely alters existing legislation, it may well be that the reform order procedure can be used to enact Law Commission proposals, as has already happened on occasion under the 2001 Act. It is simply one of the procedures; others enable Law Commission legislation to be fast-tracked, but there should be no exemption for the Law Commission from general restrictions in the Bill.
	I move on to the remaining provisions that need to be altered before the Bill can be considered acceptable. Here I shall touch only on the most important. First, we need to ensure that the test whether the reform order procedure can be legitimately used is objective and therefore not subjective. The test should not be whether the Minister considers it appropriate to use the reform order procedure, but whether it is in fact reasonable to do so. In a letter I have received from them, the Government say that the test is already objective, but I am not convinced of that and no doubt we shall need to consider it when we reach further stages.
	Next, we need to restrict the ability under this Bill to confer powers on other people. As it stands, that is far too wide. We have heard jokes about this power, such as the one which would delegate powers to President Chirac. While that may not be a very likely proposition, it is an example of how serious the problem here is. In particular, the Bill enables an order to confer powers to legislate on people other than Ministers themselves. Powers to make secondary legislation by statutory instrument should be reserved to Ministers of the Crown and should not be capable of being either delegated or transferred to other people. For others, the power to legislate should be limited to what is loosely called "tertiary legislation"; that is, the making of rules, codes of conduct, by-laws and other similar provisions. Nor should Ministers be able to use the reform order procedure to confer on other people powers which they themselves could not have exercised.
	I note and welcome the fact that in Clause 4 the Government have reintroduced restrictions on powers originally in the 2001 Act, but the wider powers in this Bill require yet further constrictions. In particular, we wish to see provisions to ensure that the regulatory reform order procedure has no adverse effect on matters of constitutional importance such as the rule of law or the independence of the judiciary.
	In Clause 9 there is a provision that the reform order procedure cannot be used to alter the Act itself or the Human Rights Act. That plainly does not go far enough. The Select Committee on the Constitution, under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Holme of Cheltenham, has set out in paragraph 53 a list of the statutes of a constitutional nature, from Magna Carta to the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which are of particular constitutional importance and therefore should not be capable of being altered by the reform order procedure.
	Listing statutes is not entirely satisfactory because there can be disagreement about what the relevant statutes are. For example, I certainly wish to see added to this list—if we make lists—the Freedom of Information Act as an Act of constitutional importance. Some Acts which are not of general constitutional importance may include provisions which are of importance. Others, such as the Constitutional Reform Act, include matters of obvious and highly significant constitutional importance but also matters which are perhaps not of such importance—for example, the procedures for dealing with complaints against judges by the ombudsman.
	The Select Committee on the Constitution suggests as an alternative what is probably a better system. This involves referring not to particular statutes but to principles such as the powers of and succession to the Crown and many other matters. Further alternative procedures might be available—for example, that something similar to the procedure for money Bills under the Parliament Act 1911 might be used, which would give the Speaker of each House a power, after obtaining advice, to certify that a draft regulatory reform order made alterations of constitutional importance.
	Again, there should be limitations not only on the power to create new offences but on the abolition of existing offences which carry a serious penalty. For example, reform orders without such restrictions would give the power to decriminalise statutes dealing with drug possession or allow assisted suicide for the terminally ill. I support the latter but it is plainly a matter for a proper Bill in Parliament and not for a regulatory reform order.
	Finally, I turn to the question of procedure. First, there should be no amendment whatever under this Bill of primary legislation by the negative resolution procedure. We need either the affirmative or the super-affirmative procedure. The use of the negative procedure is not appropriate because it does not necessarily involve any parliamentary debate or approval of the amendment to the primary legislation.
	The so-called veto in Clauses 17, 18 and 19 is plainly not genuinely a veto. I welcome, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, the Government's decision not to limit the grounds on which a Select Committee can make its recommendation, but that does not deal with the matter adequately. At present, there is no proper veto at all. The veto arises only if the committee makes a recommendation that the order should not proceed and that recommendation is not overridden by the vote of either House as a whole. Therefore the veto would be of very little use indeed in the House of Commons because Select Committees have a government majority and the Government will usually have a majority in the House. The provisions as they stand would be more effective in your Lordships' House, where the Government do not have a majority on Select Committees or in the House as a whole. But we have to remember that the powers of this House are, and remain, under serious threat and must be discounted for that reason. We need to make sure that the veto of a Select Committee will be effective.
	If this Bill had come to your Lordships' House in its original form, we would have proposed that the whole of Part 1 should simply be chucked out, as being totally and constitutionally unacceptable. The Government have moved half way but a lot of work still needs to be done on the Bill before, to use the current cliché, it becomes fit for purpose. We will do our best to achieve that and we look forward to vigorous debates when the Bill proceeds to its further stages in your Lordships' House.

Lord Desai: My Lords, I welcome the Bill and to some extent I am astonished by some of the debates about it. Lawyers live on a high plane of generality and they have a fervid imagination. I served for four years on your Lordships' Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and, believe me, I know how difficult it is to have a regulation to keep pubs open until midnight—before the present provision was passed. The first order that came before us was to extend the opening of pubs up to midnight for the Golden Jubilee celebrations. Noble Lords should look at page 60 of the excellent report of that committee—I should add that I am not a lawyer; I am an applied economist and I look at evidence first. It turns out that the Regulatory Reform (Golden Jubilee Licensing) Order 2002 took 374 days to pass. My absolute favourite, however, is the Regulatory Reform (Sugar Beet Research and Education) Order 2003 took 1,924 days to pass. When the party opposite talks about cutting red tape and the CBI says that we should cut red tape, they imagine a simple procedure such as Her Majesty the Queen opening an exhibition by cutting a red ribbon. Cutting red ribbons is different from cutting red tapes.
	This Bill is far from being intended to make grand constitutional changes, like the Magna Carta—and I think that the Magna Carta contained some dubious propositions, but I do not want to go into that. The list of the regulatory reform orders that the Government tried to pass are more than humble; they are extremely simple, ordinary things that we would all like to do. The amount of time and energy that it takes on behalf of all of us, and all the various so-called stakeholder groups who are involved, is so large and costly that people should really find a better way of amending burdensome regulation than we have so far found.
	The reason why less than half the regulatory reform orders targeted by the Government succeeded in being passed is not that the Government were lazy. You only have to look at the timetable for how long it takes for the simplest thing to go through the consultation procedure—and, when it has gone through that procedure, how often there are unintended consequences and unexpected vested interests that come to testify against, say, keeping pubs open beyond midnight. Then you realise that what we have created for ourselves is a fantastically complicated tangle of even the simplest regulations. We do not have a simple red tape to cut but a spaghetti junction of red tape. Therefore, we must seriously find a way in which to do something drastic about this.
	As always, the noble Lord will interrupt.

Lord Desai: My Lords, that exactly illustrates my point. If you cannot even keep pubs open one hour beyond their original closing hour on one day in 50 years, what is the hope of cutting any red tape at all? As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said, we all want to do efficient things and cut red tape but, as soon as the Government try to do anything, they say, "Ah, we're not going to let you do anything like that. We'll have to do it in the House and spend lots of time on it—and we much prefer primary legislation to regulatory orders because we don't trust you". Then, of course, the same people say that governments legislate too much. Why do they legislate too much? Because it has become very difficult to do the simplest thing through regulatory reform orders.
	While I welcome the Bill, I feel that it does not go far enough, not in terms of the constitutional safeguards and all that; that will only make the problem more entangled and less likely to be effective. Everything that has been said so far will make red tape more difficult to cut, although it will allow you not to have the Magna Carta amended, the probability of which under any Government is negligible. We are putting up safeguards against remote possibilities and not looking at the realities on the ground where we are creating obstacles for ourselves in making simple changes.
	I welcome what the Government said about the veto. I do not know whether we can greatly shorten the consultation procedure, but once a regulatory reform order has been presented, its passage would be greatly expedited if we were satisfied that it could be scrutinised by a committee of your Lordships' House or of another place, that the committee could occasionally recommend non-acceptance of the order, and as long as the House can approve it. What people are telling me now is that most of the suggestions are constitutionally very fine and noble and will no doubt make many lawyers very happy but that they will not speed up the efficient elimination of burdensome regulation.
	I therefore suggest that we should look at what regulatory reform orders have already been proposed and why it has been so difficult to pass them. What has taken the maximum time in passing them? Rather than worrying about the likely constitutional consequence of the Government getting away with murder, let us consider how little the Government were trying to change and how difficult it was for them to do even that. The sugar beet research corporation should have been abolished 50 years before. It should never have been started. But it took us 2,000 days to discuss a very simple administrative change. We have to leave the lofty heights of constitutional procedure and come back to the ground where we are creating a state in which it will become impossible not only for businesses but for ordinary people to operate because regulation is extremely burdensome and very difficult to remove.

Lord Whitty: My Lords, I support the Bill and, rather controversially this afternoon, I would probably have supported the original Bill, at least in large part. Although I recognise some of the points that have been made about safeguards, I take a rather different approach from some noble Lords in relation to regulation. If I were strictly accurate, I would probably have to declare a large number of past and present interests because I have been a proponent of more legislation and more regulation in a number of respects, from workers' rights through to environmental legislation, animal welfare and, currently, consumer rights. I make no apology for that because part of being in government is to regulate.
	I also recognise that on our statute book and in our enforcement culture we have had a substantial amount of bad regulation and bad enforcement practices arising from that regulation. Despite the efforts of this House under successive governments, that also applies to primary legislation. Much primary legislation is badly conceived and much of it, including recent primary legislation, has not been as well drafted as it should be, to put it mildly.
	By bad regulation, I do not necessarily mean bad in motive or objective, nor do I necessarily mean bad in terms of the costs that are imposed on business, as in some areas we need to make bad practice more expensive. I am not even talking primarily about red-tape costs, although I accept that argument. I was the Minister in Defra who set the target for cutting red-tape costs by 25 per cent and I am in favour of generalising that across government. Primarily, what I mean by bad regulation is unclear, conflicting, technically outdated, over-prescriptive, disproportionate regulation and, above all, regulation that is incomprehensible to the average expert, let alone to the average layman. Therefore, as a result of all those faults, it is ineffective and not cost-effective regulation.
	I am clearly in favour of better regulation, not necessarily less regulation. We have been regulating for some considerable time. Consumer protection legislation goes back to the Middle Ages. I declare my chairmanship of the National Consumer Council, although neither I nor the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, was present when weights and measures legislation first came in. We have been legislating on health and safety for 200 years, on the protection of workers for about the same period and on environmental protection for about 100 years. But in the past four or five decades, the pace has increased hugely and the parliamentary process still uses procedures that were established largely in the Victorian era.
	Contrary to what is sometimes alleged in this House, in this country there is a vast amount of parliamentary scrutiny compared with many other jurisdictions, both of Anglo-Saxon and of Roman provenance. Of late, much more is placed on the face of primary legislation than is the case in other jurisdictions; indeed, much of our secondary legislation would be regarded as administrative or tertiary law in many parts of the world.
	I am not advocating any change to that system, but the implication of pursuing that means that there is an enormous workload on Parliament, on parliamentary draftsmen and, in particular, on this House which makes scrutiny a centre of its endeavours. Dealing all the time with new proposals for legislation, many of which have wide support, there is a tendency to squeeze out serious consideration of the efficacy of existing legislation and the way in which that legislation is enforced.
	We have a situation in which minor issues on the face of a Bill cannot be changed without virtually the full primary legislative procedure. My noble friend Lord Desai referred to one or two in regard to the regulatory reform orders. I, as Minister, was faced with a situation in which we could not change the way in which Kew Gardens charged entrance fees without going through primary legislation and my noble friend Lord Desai referred to how it took us 2,000 days to abolish the beet sugar research corporation. It is nonsense that this House should have to go through the full procedure to make those minor changes.
	We also seem to be incapable of producing consolidation legislation. Almost everyone out there asks, "Where is the Act that governs my business, my area of interest, my activity?", and yet, every piece of new legislation or new regulation with which we deal is actually only the top strata of some archaeological structure that amends the previous Act which itself amends the one before, and so on, ad infinitum. Yesterday, to great praise, and certainly with my support, the Solicitor-General announced that the Government will try to make new laws clearer and in everyday English. As long as the structure of the legislation is there like that, however, then there is a difficulty in conveying what that legislation is trying to do.
	We have made various attempts to try to rationalise this situation. The creation of the Law Commission was one such attempt, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, has pointed out its effectiveness and the fact that it has a huge backlog. I do not follow him to his conclusion, but we should recognise that the Government and Parliament must take the Law Commission's work more seriously. There are all those outstanding measures on which they have made detailed recommendations.
	I have mentioned consolidation. There are understandable demands for consolidation elsewhere, some of them based on Law Commission reports, where the work has effectively already been done. Yet Parliament cannot find time to deal with them. Regulatory reform orders were hailed as a great breakthrough—

Lord Jenkin of Roding: My Lords, I sense a division in philosophy in the speeches made so far. Most noble Lords have concentrated on the desirability of getting more effective deregulation, but some have said that that must not be at the expense of proper parliamentary scrutiny. I align myself firmly with the second group, as my brief remarks will show. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, pointed out that we want to do two separate things that are in conflict with each other: to deregulate and to ensure proper scrutiny. That is what this debate is about.
	I shall make two points. First, when the Bill was originally introduced, it was not the first time that a Labour Government attempted to circumvent the parliamentary process by the use of a general enabling Bill. As originally introduced, it was such a Bill. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, that it is astonishing that it was ever allowed to see the light of day. Secondly, we are all familiar with the aphorism that "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance", and the Bill will provide textbooks with a copper-bottomed example of how that can work. A start was made in another place, but more needs to be done.
	A less familiar aphorism, but one that I have long believed, was contained in a remark made by a former colleague of mine in another place, Sir Derek Walker-Smith, who became, for a brief while, Lord Broxbourne, a Member of this House. In debate, he used to say that liberty is often to be found secreted in the interstices of procedure. I cut my teeth on the 1965 to 1970 Labour Finance Bills and a great deal of the debates on those Bills was about procedure. Sir Derek's intention was to rebut the Government Front Bench's defence that something was only a matter of procedure and therefore not important. This Bill is a classic example of that.
	Like my noble friend Lady Wilcox, I approach this Bill with the "deepest suspicion"—I quote her words—because Labour has tried to bring in such provisions before. With the help of the Library's excellent researchers, I have been able to clarify my recollections and run them to earth. The notion of general enabling Bills as a means of bypassing parliamentary processes originated—as so many mischievous thoughts did—with the late Richard Crossman, when he was Leader of the House in another place. He recorded this in his diaries. I will read it because it is worth recollecting. He said:
	"I had Wedgy Benn in to discuss his legislative plan—a really useful meeting because I found that in the next Session he wants five Bills for his new Department. Since this is impossible I asked him whether he couldn't have a general enabling Bill".
	He went on to say that his Permanent Secretary, Sir Otto Clarke, had already vetoed that. But it was Crossman who originally put forward the idea of a,
	"streamlined enabling Bill where only an Affirmative Order would be required for each policy".
	In a diary entry a few months later, Richard Crossman, again in relation to Mr Benn's enabling Bill, said:
	"I said I'd much prefer to give him the power to deal with these things by Order in Council. Tony won the first round in Cabinet, which committed us to the White Paper he wanted . . . then he had a meeting with the First Secretary"—
	noble Lords will remember that that was George Brown—
	"and the CBI where it could not be denied that the CBI was utterly opposed to this kind of Government action. If we were to get the Bill past them we should have to make clear that it was for assistance to private industry and not an enabling act for the extension of socialism".
	He went on to say that that was why the whole idea was dropped.
	Labour lost in 1970. It was re-elected in 1974, and the idea of general enabling Bills was resurrected this time at the instance of the new Leader of the House of Commons, Mr Ted Short. The Times stated that:
	"Senior ministers strongly believe that the forthcoming review of parliamentary procedures will have to include a detailed examination of the possibility of allowing governments to bring in general enabling Bills".
	Indeed, that is what happened. Mr Short trailed the idea in a number of speeches and broadcasts.
	When the matter came before the Select Committee on Procedure—interestingly, a number of very distinguished Members of this House served on that Select Committee, including my noble friends Lord Baker, Lord Lamont and Lord Renton and the noble Lord, Lord Radice, from the Labour Party—Mr Short gave extensive evidence, in which he made the case for enabling Bills. I do not have time to read it. By the time the committee reported, Mr Short had become Lord Glenamara and was in this House. What the committee said about the proposal was brief and to the point. In paragraph 2.30 of its report the Select Committee said:
	"We would not welcome such a development. The control of delegated legislation by means of Motions for annulment has already broken down, and the fact that Statutory Instruments are incapable of amendment by the House means that they are no substitute for defining the will of Parliament in statutes".
	That was the last heard of it.
	As was pointed out in the excellent report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee published last week, it is now clear that there are of course appropriate cases where the misnamed Henry VIII clause has become part of our usual process. In paragraph of its report the committee quotes the statement of my noble friend Lord Waddington when he was Lord Privy Seal:
	"The Government has set out its position on 'Henry VIII' provisions in several debates . . . Its view is that in a limited range of circumstances a power to amend primary legislation by order may be justifiable".
	I stress the words "limited range of circumstances" used by my noble friend. As originally drafted, this Bill could by no stretch of the imagination fall within that description.
	So what do we do about it? If we accept that there is a case for legislating in these circumstances by order, one comes back to my aphorism: liberty is often to be found secreted in the interstices of procedure. This House will now have to examine that. As my noble friend pointed out, the government amendments in another place were produced at a very late stage and had totally inadequate consideration. We will now have to do that.
	Anyone who has studied the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, to which I referred a moment ago, and the admirable report of the Constitution Committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, referred, will have been impressed, as I have been, by the complexity of the detail of the procedures now embodied in the Bill as it was introduced into this House. Who is entitled to do what and at what stage? Within what parameters and subject to what constraints and timetables? All this will require the closest scrutiny if we are to get it right. It is in the detail of those procedures—the "interstices", to quote again Sir Derek Walker-Smith—that the safeguarding of Parliament's role and the liberty of the subject must lie.
	I want to mention only one example, because it has been mentioned by many speakers. It is entirely unclear how the power of veto, resting with appropriate committees in each House, will work. Let us suppose that an order comes here first and is vetoed. It will not go any further. There can be a vote in the House, but if the vote supports the committee, that will be the end. If an order is introduced in another place and the committee imposes its veto, it can be overturned in the Commons on a general Motion. The Government can then proceed with their order. But what happens if this House again imposes the veto and the House upholds it. The order will have passed through the House of Commons and will have been frustrated in the House of Lords. There is nothing in this Bill to say what should then happen. That is one example, but there are many others where the details of procedure have to be looked at.
	My noble friend Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover rightly said that everyone wants simpler, clearer regulation. Everyone knows that much past regulation needs to be pruned and simplified. Most people now accept that in this—again, I quote my noble friend Lord Waddington—"limited range of circumstances" a specific enabling Bill is probably unavoidable. But this has to be carefully circumscribed if the Bill is not to become the Abolition of Parliament Bill, as some have described it. Given earlier attempts by past Labour Governments to introduce general enabling legislation, it behoves us to look at this Bill very carefully.
	The other day I received a letter from a lady I do not know, Alison Arbuthnot, writing from SW6 in London. She ended her letter thus:
	"Dictatorships do not emerge overnight; they creep up on those who are not concentrating. So far in this country we have avoided the worst excesses of dictatorship by a relatively happy tension between the legislature (Parliament), the executive (Government) and the judiciary . . . but we cannot take this for granted".
	The price of liberty, my Lords, is eternal vigilance.

Lord Lipsey: My Lords, I am not sure that many people in this House this evening will have been able to see the recent production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" in London, because clearly everyone has been studying this Bill in greater detail than I can claim to have done. However, I did go last week and I see so many analogies between that play and what happens here. First of all, some silly girls misbehave in the woods and squeak about it in a rather hysterical manner afterwards. Back in town, some citizens see political advantage in making use of this to cry witchcraft. Before long, a major court is established to hear the cries of witchcraft and very soon Salem is on the edge of destruction. In this case, the girls in the wood are the hysterical press commentators, who whipped up an extraordinary storm against this Bill. When it culminated in six silly Cambridge law professors suggesting that somehow Magna Carta was at risk in consequence of it, I thought that we were wholly out of the real world in which some of us like to exist. I am afraid that I feel that the Conservatives made an enormous error, having been rightly and strongly a party of deregulation. After deciding not to vote on this Bill at Second Reading in the Commons, when the Bill was watered down considerably, they then decided to vote against it at a later stage, which I feel was seeking after political advantage. I shall not go further with any analogies with the Salem courts, but I feel that much of the fuss about this Bill has been hugely exaggerated, for reasons I shall explain.
	I shall go through one or two logical points. First, there is too much regulation in this country. Everyone who has spoken, with the possible exception of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, agrees with that—and certainly I do. Secondly, it is extremely hard to deregulate. That is because civil servants, brought up as they have been in a culture of regulation, see it as cheaper than spending public money—and anyway there is not the Treasury to stop them doing it. They have a predisposition to regulate when faced with a problem.
	As for industry, it talks with forked tongues. Of course, it is against regulation in general—and you hear all this stuff about £50 billion. But if you look at each specific industry and the regulations that affect it, you usually find that the existing firms in that industry are the strongest defenders of those regulations. Why? Because they act as a tremendous barrier to entry by small firms and outsiders. As for Ministers, they naturally prefer to expend their political capital in doing something rather than undoing something that somebody else has done. So there is a strong difficulty in deregulation, which makes me think that we should be very careful about erecting big parliamentary barriers against doing it.
	I may delude myself, but I feel that over the past 18 months or so, for the first time deregulation is beginning to get a momentum. A real effort is being made to change Whitehall culture. The five principles dreamed up by the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, in his desk chair are now on every wall in Whitehall. The process is gaining momentum; for example, it is completely inconceivable that the Government would bring forward now the absurd regulations on the control of care homes and their standards that only four years ago they were forced to withdraw when clearly they would have closed most of the care homes in the country. There is an opportunity here, and we must not let an over-concern with the minutiae of how Parliament deals with it stand in the way.
	I have heard all that has been said about parliamentary procedures. Of course, there is a narrow argument to be had about whether the protections in Clauses 13, 16, 17, 18 and 19—the super-affirmative procedure and all that—are sufficient. They are all there; the Government have given an awful lot. But when it comes down to it, Parliament can stop anything happening that it wants to. It is not confined to voting on the orders that might be involved; it can move to reduce a Minister's salary or force his resignation, for example. If any Government did what the silly professors said was being done and brought forward a Bill to abolish Magna Carta, abolish jury trials or lock every citizen up for life and all those sorts of things, Parliament would of course stop it, and it would not require the detailed menu for doing so that is the focus of this Bill.
	There is a school of thought in both Houses that sees the best defence for the respect of Parliament as being to hang on to every power and tradition you have—to ancient traditions and ceremonies. I do not believe that that is going to affect what the British people in the end decide they think of Parliament. What the people want is what we can deliver for them—that is the era in which we live. Deregulation is about delivery—of growth and jobs and, very importantly, of practical freedom to people in how they go about their daily business and run their daily businesses.
	The Bill may require some adjustment of balance, although most noble Lords may wish to adjust it in a different direction from the one that I would prefer. But it represents a modern approach, whereby we put in due safeguards for Parliament and its rights but they are not allowed to stand in the way of due expedition in getting rid of the onerous regulations that weigh down our society and impede us in many of the ways that make our daily lives less pleasant.

Lord Norton of Louth: My Lords, I have listened with considerable interest to the speeches of those who support the Bill. They proceed on the basis that there is a problem with achieving deregulation. This Bill is designed to achieve deregulation. It replaces the 2001 Act, which has not been used inappropriately to carry through great controversial changes. Therefore, they say, this Bill should be supported. But making the case for deregulation does not make the case for this particular Bill. The Bill not only offers the wrong solution but is premised on a questionable view of where the problem lies. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, says that we should look at alternatives to existing procedures. I do not disagree with the point that he makes—this Bill is an alternative. I do not believe that it is a desirable alternative.
	The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has misunderstood fundamentally the protection that parliamentary procedure provides against a government majority in the other place. He proceeds on the basis that Parliament can decide to do what it wants; in other words, the majority view will prevail. However, if the Government have a majority in the other place, what is to constrain them other than the procedures of the institution itself? That is the fundamental point that he completely fails to grasp.
	This Bill is remarkable for what it was and what it is. It is remarkable for what it was at the time of introduction—the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, notwithstanding. As Barry Winetrobe, reader in law at Napier University, wrote in the March issue of the SCOLAG Legal Journal, echoing the views of other legal experts, the Government's proposal
	"is a constitutionally lethal combination of a skeletal, framework or enabling Act and 'Henry VIII' powers to amend existing legislation by ministerial order. No amount of ministerial assurances or 'concessions' on scope or parliamentary scrutiny can get away from the central point that the job of making the law is being transferred from the Legislature to Ministers".
	What is of considerable concern is not just the contents of the Bill as originally introduced but the reaction of the Government to criticisms of the measure. It appeared to take them by surprise. That it did so should give us pause for reflection. It reflects, in my view, a problem not just with the attitude of government but also the structure of government. There is a Department for Constitutional Affairs that is, in effect, still a Lord Chancellor's Department. There is, I fear, no department with a fundamental understanding of the basic tenets of our constitution and the role of Parliament within our constitutional arrangements. That is apparent from the letters from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor and Jim Murphy reproduced in Appendix 1 to the report of the Constitution Committee. We need at some stage to address this wider issue.
	I turn to the problem with the Bill as it is. It remains fundamentally flawed. Amendments made to the Bill in the other place have provided some restriction in scope and strengthened parliamentary scrutiny, but they do not go far enough. The provisions remain inadequate for three principal reasons—those of time, institutional scrutiny and powers. As such, the Bill replicates the problems with the 2001 Act, but on a greater scale. Each House will now have the potential to consider every order made under the Bill; there is a mechanism to increase the level of parliamentary approval and also to block the order. On the face of it, that is a major improvement. The problem is that, whatever the level chosen, the process is time limited and institutionally constrained. An essential resource in Parliament's arsenal in relation to government is not simply the vote, crucial though that is, but time and institutional mechanisms for debate. Measures are considered over a period of time through structures designed to probe, to force government to justify the particular provisions as well as the principle of the measure, and if necessary to amend it.
	As we have heard, Clause 1(7) permits an order to amend or repeal any enactment. The only measures exempted are Part 1 of the Bill and the Human Rights Act. Leaving those aside, an order may—and it is the potential that is important—make a fundamental change to our constitutional arrangements. Even under the super-affirmative resolution procedure, as under the 2001 Act, there will be a maximum of only 60 days to consider it. That may seem sufficient time, but bear in mind that the normal institutional mechanisms of scrutiny, deliberation and probing are not engaged. The scrutiny will be by a designated committee, which can be overridden by a vote in the Chamber. The House having the ultimate say is justifiable on constitutional grounds but in this instance that is vitiated by the fact that it is a single vote, divorced from any sustained scrutiny by the House itself.
	With Bills, the House can consider and make amendments. Under the procedure in this measure, as with the 2001 Act, neither House can amend an order. A Minister may reconsider a draft order as a result of representations made to him, but it is ultimately up to the Minister as to what is included. Under Clause 19(2), the Minister "must have regard to" representations as well as resolutions or recommendations emanating from Parliament, but—as we have variously discussed in this House—the requirement to "have regard to" is a soft one in law. The Minister can choose to proceed with the order as originally introduced. A government secure in their majority in the Commons may then seek the approval of the other place, in a single Division, to an order making a draconian change to the law of the land. As such, the provisions of the Bill undermine the basic equilibrium of legitimacy that underpins the parliamentary process. The Government have a right to get their business, but the Opposition have a right to be heard. This measure could be used to undermine the rights of the Opposition.
	The Government claim that the orders made under this measure will not cover anything of major constitutional significance—cited in aid is the fact that the 2001 Act has not been used in any sense in that way; that these will be dealt with by the normal legislative process; and that Ministers will consider very carefully all representations made to them when orders are brought forward. Indeed, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, said it about the 2001 Act and he and other Ministers have said so in respect of this Bill. The problem with this, as we have heard this afternoon and as the Constitution Committee has observed, is that an assurance by a Minister in a letter or at the Dispatch Box does not bind Ministers in the future—be they Labour or Conservative Ministers—and, as long as the words of the Bill are unambiguous, the courts will not look at what the Minister has said.
	When the Hunting Bill was going through and was then enacted through the provisions of the Parliament Act, various people took umbrage and said, "That's not what the Parliament Act was designed for". My response was that it is not relevant what it was designed for; it is the words of the measure that matter. That is it. It is quite possible that this Bill in, say, 20 years' time could be a godsend to a government who might be intent, say, on leaving the European Union.

Lord Howard of Rising: My Lords, much of what I wanted to say has already been said rather more elegantly and eloquently than I could have done, so I shall try to be brief.
	Any Bill which proposes to transfer power from Parliament to the Executive erodes the freedom of the individual and is bad news. However laudable the purposes of the Bill—I yield to no one in my dislike of bureaucracy and red tape—it does not justify diminishing the power of Parliament in favour of the Government or of any commission. No discussion of desirable objectives or technicalities of vetoes can get away from the fundamental point, which is that the role of Parliament is to be reduced.
	Any Act created to bypass Parliament for the purpose of abolishing bad laws will also enable good laws to be disposed of. Who is to say which laws are good and which are bad? It is the decision of a Minister who has an extremely wide brief.
	The Bill refers to "administrative inconvenience" as grounds for using power given under the Act. I am not clever but I can think of almost no law that is not administratively inconvenient. However good the intentions and undertakings given at the outset, all powers are sooner or later abused by Government. Usually that takes some time. In the case of the present Government, it seems to happen almost immediately. There are almost daily examples of recent Acts of Parliament being used for purposes for which they were not intended: an Act designed to counter terrorism that was used to threaten bankers with extradition; the arrest of an elderly gentleman for barracking at a political party conference; police threats over the wording on a t-shirt; the arrest next to the Cenotaph of readers of a list of British dead in Iraq. I could go on. There is a constant stream of examples.
	I ask your Lordships to consider the potential for abuse which exists under the proposed legislation. I am sure that does not apply to the present Government, but what about future Governments who will not feel bound by today's conventions and will examine the small print to find ways to use the powers of the Bill—should it become an Act—in a manner which is not now intended? As my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth has said, the Bill is flawed. Legislation which diminishes the role of Parliament in favour of the Executive or any other body is a step on a slippery slope, which this House should resist.
	This Government have introduced an endless stream of new laws together with statutory instruments at a rate of about 4,000 a year. If the Government have a genuine interest in reducing regulation, they should control their passion for new laws and give parliamentary time to repealing laws they consider inappropriate.

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: My Lords, I took over responsibility for better regulation in 2001, as Minister for the Cabinet Office, just as the Regulatory Reform Act came into force. I recall the great enthusiasm with which we looked forward to the effects of the regulatory reform orders. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy of Lour, so eloquently said, the reality was sadly different from what we expected, despite all the effort that was put into the matter. The noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy, referred to an average of 571 days being taken in this regard. The great sugar beet saga was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Desai. I believe that legislation on births, deaths and marriages was also an issue. The delay over relatively trivial matters eventually persuaded departments that the relevant effort was not worth while. That would be very sad if it were the conclusion; it was obviously made after I left the Government in 2003.
	It is important to try to keep these matters within the perspective that the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, introduced when he talked about the 1994 Act. The description he gave of the consultation that went on with business was exactly the way to proceed at that time. Business and others would have wished the Government well in their pursuit of more effective regulation, but those hopes too in 1994 were dashed. Michael Howard said that the Conservatives were less effective at deregulating than they should have been. Michael Portillo said that the Conservatives,
	"were rather notable regulators. We passed volumes of new rules and laws interfering with almost every aspect of business and social life".
	Angela Browning said, after spending three years as a Minister under the Conservative Government, who tried to reduce regulation in business, that they would be the first to say that they did not do very well. Kenneth Clarke said:
	"We kept trying, we never really succeeded".
	I have every sympathy with those Conservative Ministers given my own experience in Government, but I am sure that positive advances were made by that Conservative Government and we tried to build on them. We should give credit for the advances that have been made. Therefore, it is wrong to put emphasis on the number of statutory instruments. More than 90 per cent of those instruments have almost no relation at all to business—in fact, a very small percentage would affect business. Therefore, that is a misleading indicator of how well we are doing.
	It would be better to look at the advances made by the Better Regulation Task Force. The noble Lord, Lord Haskins, is present. Everyone who has looked at this area in detail will give credit to the foundation work that he did, and to the work of Sir David Arculus in carrying forward the difficult task of better regulation. I say from a government perspective that I as a Minister was left in no doubt of the very high priority accorded to this matter by both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. We had a regulatory reform action plan—I am sure that it was rather similar to that described by the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury—of which we managed to implement about 400 measures.
	Like the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, I have spent most of my life in the private sector. When I asked for specifics of the problems that business faced, I had hoped for a better response than the one which I eventually received. It was very difficult to get businesses to come forward with specifics that we could address. I notice that the new chairman of the Better Regulation Commission, Rick Haythornthwaite, makes the same complaint. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said that there was a suspicion that complexity was welcomed by some large companies as it constituted an entry barrier. I have never come across that in my business experience. However, I share the disappointment of others that business has not been more active in this debate. Therefore, I welcome the role played by the CBI and John Cridland in insisting that your Lordships and Parliament do not lose sight of the intended outcomes to try to reduce the regulatory burden on business.
	The regulatory burden will be helped by the work being done following the Hampton report on the reduction of inspection regimes. Particularly coming from a background in the media, I have been impressed by Ofcom's role as a super-regulator. The two FSAs—finance and food—have also been impressive in what they have begun to do. The reductions that are following already are pretty impressive. Britain, in giving the lead that it has built up over the past couple of decades in this area, has been able to influence Europe. Our regulatory impact assessment regime, while in no sense yet fully satisfactory, at least is far in advance of anything that we can see elsewhere in the EU. I notice that Commissioner Verheugen has adopted a number of British proposals and is trying to push those through.
	The Dutch experience, which was examined by the Better Regulation Task Force, was interesting too. The Dutch reckoned that about 3.6 per cent of GDP went on an administrative burden. In British terms, that would be a very large amount of money. I welcomed from the Back Benches the action plan put forward by the Chancellor in the Budget in 2005 to get departments to introduce simplification plans, which we hope will in implementation save us about 1 per cent of GDP. I will leave a lot of the constitutional questions to the lawyers, who are far better versed in these matters than I am but, again from my ministerial experience, I particularly appreciated the chairmanship of the committees both here and in another place that dealt with regulatory matters. The noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, was particularly helpful to me as a Minister. I wonder whether there might be a Joint Committee to replace those committees, which would have the resources and the authority to try to drive through the simplifications that we all need.
	Under the action plan for better regulation, measuring and reducing burdens, lighter risk-based inspection, streamlining inspectorates to cut down on repeat requests, and better regulation in Europe are all under way. I hope that what can be achieved under this plan will build on the efforts of this Government and Governments past in what is surely a shared endeavour. Certainly, business would be looking for better regulation and less of it.

The Earl of Onslow: My Lords, I was 100 per cent against the Bill until the speech of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, when he informed us that the Hunting Act could be repealed under it. So, perhaps my opposition to the Bill is not as vicious as it might have been; but I hope that that viciousness will return.
	Everyone agrees that regulation is a problem. Surely, bad regulation arises out of regulation, not legislation. It is the regulations that are at fault. Such regulations have been drafted and given legal power by primary legislation; so, surely, it is possible under existing primary legislation to get the regulations right. I asked the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, during his opening speech—which was so full of glorious clichés that I might apply to be cliché writer for the Minister by appointment—which Acts he thought needed to be repealed as a result of this Bill. He stated that I had got the question wrong. I have not got the question wrong.
	At Clause 1(1), the Bill states:
	"A Minister of the Crown may by order under this section make any provision"—
	and it continues in subsection (2)—
	"resulting directly or indirectly for any person from any legislation".
	That says that if the Bill is enacted the Government can, using this procedure, repeal primary legislation. So I ask the Minister again whether he know of any Acts that he and his Government would like to repeal. Please may we have an answer? If he does not know the answer, it is disgraceful to say, "Hey ho, let's introduce a Bill that will give us the power to repeal Acts of Parliament. We don't know that we need to use it yet and we promise that we won't anyway". I would not trust my noble friend Lord Kingsland with that power under any circumstances whatever or any Government if that could be avoided. The Government's power to repeal legislation is already in the Civil Contingencies Act, which the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, did not get to because his historical analysis stopped with Richard Crossman.
	It is not as if the Government are not so fond of legislation. They have pandered to the hippophagist tendencies of the French and forced horse passports on us for the first time since the horse was domesticated in central Asia is about 2000BC.
	I heard on the wireless today that if you are an old person watching television in a private room in an old people's home, you have to get a separate television licence, but that if you watch television in the public rooms, one licence covers everyone. Each private room in an old people's home has to have a television licence. I cannot see that that regulation needs primary legislation to be repealed. The Minister shakes his head but I heard that in an interview with the television licence people on the way up here in the car.
	The idea that the Government can be trusted with even the concept of reducing regulation is slightly scary. Furthermore, they cannot be trusted with the constitution either. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has no concept of a Whig and balanced constitution. He thinks that it does not matter that Ministers of the Crown can repeal legislation. What are we in Parliament for except to stop Ministers of the Crown, who are supposed to be responsible to us?

Lord Kingsland: My Lords, in a solitary moment of emotion in an otherwise dispassionate and well argued speech, the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, turned to the government Benches and cried, "How on earth did this Bill see the light of day?"
	I think that I can provide the answer to the noble Lord. It lies in the attitude of the Government to our fundamental freedoms. We have only to glance at the recent meretricious record of the Government on our long-standing constitutional protections. Your Lordships will recall that in 2004, in the Bill dealing with asylum appeals, the Government attempted to remove the power of the courts to review the decisions of asylum tribunals. They sought to oust judicial review. Mercifully, because of the revolt of the judges, the Government withdrew from the brink. More recently, another attempt was made when, effectively, the Government sought to suspend habeas corpus by introducing a measure in another place which would allow detention without charge for 90 days. That was defeated by a revolt of the Government's own Back Benchers. We have even more recent evidence of a fundamental freedom being threatened—the attempt by the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General to introduce a piece of delegated legislation which would have removed the right of jury trial in fraud cases.
	Taking those three issues—the ousting of the court, the suspension of habeas corpus and the attempted removal of jury trial—is it so surprising that the Government presented a Bill to abolish Parliament? Effectively, that is what the Bill in its original form would have done. As I understand it, the distinction between primary legislation and delegated legislation is that Parliament is supreme and, therefore, it can do anything; but a Minister can make delegated legislation only within the constraints of a parliamentary statute. The original draft of this Bill abolished, effectively, that distinction. The Bill simply required the Minister to make legislative reforms; so there was a complete elision between the tradition that law is made by Parliament and the delegated law-making authority of Ministers.
	Thankfully, that was stopped by a combination of the growing recognition, first, by the Liberal Benches and then by the Conservative Benches, that the Bill contained a cancer, and, secondly, a remarkable campaign in the press. The sum of those two things made the Government think again. As a number of my noble friends have said, that fact should not be forgotten when we consider the provisions of the Bill. There are still certain proposals that echo what the Government originally attempted to do.
	The noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, also drew attention, quite rightly, as chairman of the Select Committee on the Constitution, to the issue of pre-legislative review. Is it not remarkable, unlike the Bill of 2001 which had proper pre-legislative review and proper consultation, that neither of those was undertaken before this Bill saw the light of day? There was no draft Bill and there was no pre-legislative consultation. It is worth reading to your Lordships what the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Holme, said on this point. I quote from paragraph 19 of the report of the Select Committee on the Constitution, which was published on 8 June:
	"We are concerned by the way in which a bill with constitutional implications has been handled. The consultative process was lamentable: for example, the consultation document on reform of the Regulatory Reform Act 2001 did not capture the full extent of the Government's proposals as they emerged in the original version of the bill. It is unfortunate, too, that the opportunity was not taken to give pre-legislative scrutiny to the bill, in sharp contrast to the approach taken in 2000 to the Regulatory Reform Bill, where pre-legislative scrutiny was commended as 'a model of this process'".
	A number of your Lordships have asked the question—I think particularly of the contribution made by my noble friend Lord Goschen—do we really need the Bill at all? What can the Bill do that its predecessors cannot do? The Minister must answer that question when he replies on behalf the Government. This point was considered in the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, who I am very pleased to see in his place. Paragraph 16 of that report states:
	"Neither the Government's review, nor any evidence to Parliament which has accompanied this bill, has demonstrated that there are significant structural flaws in the 2001 Act. We asked the Government for examples of proposals which they wished to deliver under the 2001 Act but were not able to do so due to the wording of the current test: other than the examples in Annex C to their memorandum, they have not been able to do so. Given this, it is our opinion that the block to regulatory reform is departmental priorities rather than the 'burden' test in the 2001 Act".
	So it is quite clear that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has reached a clear view on that—opposite to the view that the Government have advanced today in their opening.
	To what extent is a Bill of this kind an answer to the kind of problems that have been identified, for example, by my noble friend Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, and by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of Tradeston? I have been looking at the report by Mr Philip Hampton, which has not received much attention in this debate. It is called Reducing administrative burdens: effective inspection and enforcement. Chart 2.2, on page 11, sets out the 10 largest national regulators by volume of inspection and enforcement staff. These are, in order of the greatest number of employees, the Environment Agency, the Health and Safety Executive, the Financial Services Authority, Companies House, something called CAA-SRG—I confess I do not know what that is—the Rural Payments Agency, the Meat Hygiene Service, the Office of Fair Trading, the Housing Corporation, environmental health, and trading standards.
	Those regulators are at the coal face of industry. How will the Bill relate to what they do? Can the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, tell me what concerns the Government have about the current way in which the Environment Agency is regulating the people whom it regulates? Why is that regulation so costly? What can this Bill do specifically to reduce the burden of regulation by the Environment Agency on those whom it regulates? I shall not ask him to do that for the other nine, and he can choose another body if he wishes. I believe that the House would like to hear how what is set out in the Bill will be relevant to what we hope those agencies will do to the people whom they regulate. Unless we can have an answer to that, I do not understand why we are wasting our time here tonight. This is all about regulatory culture, as my noble friend Lady Wilcox said, but as far as I can see, there is nothing whatever about regulatory culture in the Bill.
	Assuming that we will not vote against the Bill at Second Reading and that we shall advance to Committee stage, it is only fair that I let the Minister know what line we will take on amendments. Our first concern is with the scope of Clause 1, which is entitled:
	"Power to remove or reduce burdens".
	I have two observations on that. First, why is the title not "Power to remove or reduce regulatory burdens"? As my noble friend Lord Onslow said, the scope of that clause is immense. Apart from the Bill, when it subsequently becomes an Act, and the Human Rights Act—exceptions are made for both of those categories—Clause 1 could amend any piece of primary legislation or any piece of the secondary legislation. Given the concerns expressed in your Lordships' House today, would it not be better if the Government limited the scope of Clause 1 to regulatory burdens? That, after all, is what the Bill is supposed to be about.
	I also draw the Minister's attention to Clause 1(2):
	"That purpose is removing or reducing any burden, or the overall burdens, resulting directly or indirectly for any person from any legislation".
	Focusing on the expression "or the overall burdens", as I understand it, power can be used to increase burdens on a particular group under this Bill provided that, overall, there is a net reduction. If the Minister agrees with me about that interpretation, how does he justify it? How can a deregulating Bill actually, in certain phases of deregulation, increase the regulatory burden on certain individuals?
	A question dealt with, in my respectful submission, totally satisfactorily by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, was about which areas should be excluded from the Bill. We already know that the Bill can no longer amend itself. As a result of considerable pressure, we now know that the Government have accepted that they cannot amend the Human Rights Act 1998. In paragraph 53 of the report of the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, we find a long list of measures, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, which ought also to be excluded from the Bill. I should be most grateful if the Minister would tell us in his closing speech whether he accepts paragraph 53 in total or, if not, which particular measures in that paragraph he agrees ought to be excluded and which should not.
	The veto has excited much attention from many of your Lordships around the House—if I mention my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding, I hope that I do not do any other noble Lords a disservice by not mentioning them. The veto measures in the Bill, even with the Government's concession this afternoon, for which we are of course grateful, are simply not adequate protection. The fact that a committee of another place—or, indeed, your Lordships' House—can issue a veto is of no comfort at all if that committee is run politically; because all that is necessary is for the whip majority to vote for the measure. Moreover, there is also a provision in the Bill allowing a decision of another place to override the decision of the committee, even if the committee issues a veto.
	I should be interested to know what the Minister will propose to extricate himself from that difficulty. I suggest one possible solution: to follow the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, and, rather than have a committee of another place deal with this matter, have a Joint Committee in which no single party has an overall majority. There might be a sufficient number of, for example, Cross-Benchers from your Lordships' House to sit on it. In those circumstances, with a Joint Committee that is not dominated by any one party, a decision to veto, or not, would have a great deal more credibility and would be much more likely to be accepted by both Houses of Parliament and more generally in the outside world of regulators and regulatees. We shall certainly return to the veto issue in Committee.
	I entirely endorse everything that has been said about the Law Commission proposals, from the Liberal Democrat Benches, our own Benches and from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick. That matter was also addressed in the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee's report at paragraph 63. I hope I shall not be over-tiring your Lordships if I read it out:
	"For these reasons, we conclude that it is inappropriate for Law Commission recommendations to be implemented by order and we recommend that the House seek the removal of clause 3 from the bill. Such legislation (if outside the scope of clause 1) is better made by bill, where all members of the House may participate and propose amendments; and amendments may be made by, and reconciled between, the two Houses in the usual way."
	That ought to be absolutely conclusive as far as the Government are concerned. It could not have come from a more authoritative source. The Government want to expedite Law Commission measures, and I entirely endorse everything that has been said about the importance of raising their profile, particularly those which are uncontroversial. However, it has at its disposal the Jellicoe procedure, which was used four times between 1964 and 1967, three times with complete success. The fourth failed only because the Bill was plainly controversial to certain parties in another place.
	It was said by the noble Lord, Lord Garden, in winding up, that not much attention has been paid to the EC dimension. I say only that one of the great problems we have had with EC measures, particularly directives, is that many civil servants—it is unfair for me to criticise civil servants—many government Ministers have not been able to resist the temptation to implement directives in a way that raises the compliance requirements contained in the directives themselves. We shall therefore be tabling an amendment in Committee obliging the Government to implement directives to the standards contained in the directives and no higher. In that way, there is a reasonable chance of our being able to compete on a level playing field with every country in the European Community subject to the same rules.
	As my noble friend Lady Wilcox said towards the end of her speech, surely the best way of confronting this problem is to produce fewer regulations in the first place. The biggest contribution the Government can make to improving competition in this country and lowering the regulatory burden is, starting tomorrow, to stop regulating.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: I thought that there would be some agreement, my Lords. I have now listened for some four hours to contributions and comments from all sides of your Lordships' House. I have got to the stage where I cannot quite make up my mind exactly where the main focus of interest in the Bill will lie.
	The noble Lord, Lord Garden, set out a fair summary of the four generalities of issues raised in the debate. But noble Lords opposite, in particular, seem uncertain as to whether they wish to get rid of the whole Bill or parts of the Bill, welcome some of the Bill, welcome even more bits of the Bill or simply raise fundamental constitutional objections. I find that slightly confusing because, on 13 April, after some amendments had been placed in another place, the Conservative Party issued a press release welcoming the Government's approach to amending the Bill and the further focus on delivering the better regulation agenda. Some of the contributions from the Benches opposite have certainly welcomed our approach; others have, as I said, been rather more fundamental in their approach.
	There were, at the outset, some warm words from the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, among some slightly less warm words. She said that we had listened to concerns and that the Bill was fresh and a step in the right direction. The noble Baroness said that you had to have political will in the deregulatory field and that, rather than just talking about it, you had to do it. I entirely endorse that approach; it is exactly what we are attempting to do with this Bill.
	The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, reminded us that this was initially a rather uncontroversial measure. He then said that it became rather more controversial when Members in another place—principally, I think, Mr Heath and Mr Howarth from the Liberal Democrat Benches—decided that it was controversial and deeply flawed because of what they saw as profound constitutional implications.
	So the debate has ranged far and wide. I particularly enjoyed the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, which was a necessary corrective view of the Government's intentions. In the same vein, I enjoyed the supportive contributions of my noble friends Lord Lipsey, Lord Macdonald and Lord Whitty. Their support is based on a profound understanding of what the Government are trying to do so far as deregulation is concerned. My noble friend Lord Macdonald is very experienced in this field, particularly with his business expertise, and he reminded us that former government Ministers from the Conservative Party let the cat out of the bag when they told the public that they got gold stars by becoming heavily exercised regulators in their time.
	The problem, if there is a profound problem, has been with us not just during the life of this Government, but across Governments. But this Government are committed to having a long look at the way in which regulation works and trying to create procedures that unpick that, as were the Conservative Government in the early 1990s. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, for his contribution, which focused on practical considerations. I well remember the work of the task forces and, although at times I would have disagreed with some of their propositions and proposals, I think that they were going in the right direction. In some ways, the Bill builds on that work, because its genesis goes back to 1994 and the first deregulatory measure in legislation, the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act of that year. There is agreement that it is important to create an effective legislative vehicle for delivering better regulation, and I hope that we will have the constructive debates that some Members of your Lordships' House have focused on in their contributions today.
	Much of the debate focused on Clause 3, which provides the power to implement Law Commission recommendations. I listened particularly carefully to the contribution made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, which was echoed by the noble Lords, Lord Kingsland, Lord Holme, Lord Norton, Lord Garden and Lord Goodhart, as well as by many other noble Lords. So I think that I should start by focusing more of my time on that part of the Bill. I think that we would all agree that it has taken Governments in general too long to implement worthwhile law reform proposals recommended by the Law Commission, of which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, gave some useful examples. The Law Commission's annual report for 2005 showed that there are 16 currently accepted but unimplemented Law Commission reports and that the average waiting time for enactment of Law Commission reports is now over seven years. An example of Law Commission recommendations that could be implemented by order are those on third party rights against insurers. That perhaps illustrates the value of Clause 3 as currently drafted.
	I would have been deaf indeed if I had not heard the breadth of concern expressed by Members of your Lordships' House about the power in Clause 3. As the noble Lord, Lord Garden, and other noble Lords said, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee raised a fundamental question about the appropriateness of the power to implement Law Commission recommendations by order. The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, suggested that I might acknowledge that this evening and offer to remove Clause 3. I am not going to do that, but I am going to ensure that we give careful consideration to the comments that have been made so that we can meet and match the concerns that lie behind them.
	I ought to say that my noble friend Lady Ashton will be dealing with this Part of the Bill, and I will be working with her to study closely the comments made on Clause 3. I have no doubt that in Committee much time will be spent carefully going through the various amendments that will be tabled. I want to put on record our thanks to noble Lords for having raised those concerns, because I recognise their constitutional importance. I think it only fair to say that we need to spend more time taking careful note of Law Commission proposals, not least because they can uncontroversially make valuable changes to the law. However, Law Commission proposals require careful consideration, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said that we have to find a mechanism for ensuring that non-controversial Law Commission proposals can find their way more rapidly on to the statute book. I remain wedded to Clause 3 in its current form, but we will give careful consideration to the argument made on that point.
	During my original contribution, the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, raised the issue of the sort of measures and proposals that the Government might wish to repeal using this legislation. He asked which Acts of Parliament will be repealed. It is right to focus on specifics, and there are some that I can put forward this evening. Specific examples of measures that we may seek to abolish as a consequence of carrying through the legislation were attached to the Government's memoranda to the Delegated Powers Committee. Of course, it is possible to repeal Acts of Parliament under the 2001 Act. There are many examples of parts of legislation that we may wish to get rid of, review or amend in some way. For instance, the Charity Commission plans a review of the financial thresholds at which certain audit and registration requirements are required of charities. The DTI plans reviews to simplify—

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Lord obviously knows a great deal more about legislative slots than I do. He was a Minister in a powerful Government with a large majority. I have no doubt that he argued passionately at each instance for the measures that he believed were right and I have no doubt that he added to the burden of legislation. That is why we need this piece of legislation, just as the Conservative Government in the early 1990s thought that they needed legislation to improve the quality of regulation.
	I take very seriously the question, "Could we not simply reform the 2001 Act?" That observation was made the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and was echoed from the Benches opposite. What we say about the 2001 Act is simply this: we wish to build on the Act. It has proved useful to an extent. The statistics on its operation show that 28 useful reforms have been delivered by the regulatory reform order process, which is the order-making power contained in the 2001 Act. But that process has proven to be too technical and complex, which has meant that many worthwhile reforms could not be delivered and that those that have been delivered have involved a disproportionate amount of legal analysis in their preparation. My noble friend Lord Desai told us how many—

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. This short Bill of two clauses comes from the other place unamended. It has the support of Her Majesty's Opposition who commended the Bill to the House, stating that they wish to help secure the Bill's speedy passage. It also has the support of the Liberal Democrats, who observed that they look forward to the Housing Corporation being able to continue to carry out its functions efficiently.
	It is not the longest Bill that has ever come before this House, but it has significance beyond its length in safeguarding social housing. That takes us to the heart of the Bill. Its purpose is simple. It gives the Housing Corporation a power of delegation from its board to below board level to any of its members, committees or employees in the future. It also deems the corporation always to have had such a power since it was founded in 1964. We need primary legislation because it is the only way in which we can be absolutely certain that the full range of past decisions of the corporation are valid and can provide a power of delegation going forward.
	I will give noble Lords a bit of history on why we are in this position. My speaking note is rather long, but I shall try to cover some of the issues that were raised in another place. Until the end of last year it was believed that the Housing Corporation board had an implied power of delegation. It was not just the corporation that thought it had such a power. Everyone else with an interest—my department, the lending community, housing associations and the 2 million people who live in housing association homes—thought that it had.
	I know that noble Lords are aware of what the Housing Corporation does and its importance to the provision and maintenance of high quality social housing in this country. However, perhaps I may explain what the Bill needs to achieve and put that into some context. The Housing Corporation was established under the Housing Act 1964 to oversee the housing association sector. Its position was later consolidated in subsequent legislation and its role and functions are now principally set out in the Housing Act 1996. Today, the corporation plays a crucial role in regulating nearly 1,800 housing associations—registered social landlords, or RSLs—which own or manage more than 2 million units of social housing and provide a range of other services to the broader community. The activities of the Housing Corporation have a direct impact on the lives of several million people in our society, many of whom are among the most vulnerable.
	In carrying out its duties as regulator, the corporation drives improvements in housing association performance and efficiency to ensure that tenants have high quality homes to live in. It also has a strong focus on ensuring that housing associations are financially viable in order to protect the public investment in social housing and to ensure that associations continue to attract private finance at competitive rates to build and improve affordable homes.
	Equally important, the corporation is also the delivery agent for the provision of new social housing in England. It helps to develop and implement regional and national housing strategies, using public subsidy to procure affordable housing, being responsible for the national affordable housing programme. As noble Lords opposite know, after many years of experience, it has a very far-reaching role. It is obviously important therefore to facilitate the smooth passage of this Bill in order to safeguard the valuable work that it has done since 1964.
	The powers of the Housing Corporation need explanation. When it was created in 1964, it was very much a creature of its time. It was common for public bodies and non-departmental public bodies not to be given an explicit power of delegation. One reason for this is that at the time many bodies took fewer statutory decisions. It was therefore plausible for all such decisions to be carried out by the board. However, the primary reason that such explicit powers of delegation were not included in the legislative provisions establishing bodies such as the corporation is that at that time powers of delegation were more readily taken to be implied. Since then, the majority of bodies set up without explicit powers have been wound up or have had their legislation modernised to confer such powers. However, that did not happen in the case of the Housing Corporation.
	It appears that the reason for the failure to modernise the legislation was administrative oversight. We are not aware of any other NDPB being in the same predicament as the Housing Corporation. With hindsight, it is clear that the corporation's powers should have been reviewed at the time of the passing of the Housing Associations Act 1985, which this Bill amends. An explicit power of delegation should have been included in that Act. Unfortunately, no such action was taken. Subsequently, the passage of further Housing Acts in 1996 and 2004 would have provided another opportunity to give the corporation such a power, but it was again overlooked. It is very regrettable that that did not happen because we now have to spend separate parliamentary time on this issue.
	I should like to emphasise again that the board of the corporation believed that it had an implied power of delegation and has been acting in good faith on that basis since its inception in 1964. We know that because the corporation's board minutes record numerous instances of delegation of decisions taking place. Nowhere is there any suggestion that the corporation thought that it was acting unlawfully in doing so.
	The problem was uncovered during preparations for an internal training course on delegations at the end of last year. The corporation discovered that an express power to delegate did not exist, and that it was unlikely that such a power could be implied. Legal advice to my officials confirmed that this was the case, and we promptly set about addressing the problem. It became clear that legislation was the only way to rectify the problem.
	The Bill merely seeks to give the corporation a power which analogous bodies already have. Similar bodies, including the Audit Commission, English Partnerships, English Heritage and the Commission for Social Care Inspection, already enjoy such a power. The Bill seeks to give the Housing Corporation a power of delegation which everyone concerned thought that it already had, and therefore to return to the position that we thought we were in before the problem was discovered.
	I should like to explain two things. First, I shall outline the specific detail of the Bill and its provisions for the record. Secondly, I want to look at some of the key issues raised in debate in the other place in order to reassure noble Lords and to demonstrate why the Opposition and Liberal Democrats supported the Bill and urged its speedy passage through Parliament.
	The Bill has two clauses. Clause 1(1) gives the corporation an express power going forward to delegate the exercise of its functions to individual members of its board, its committees, sub-committees and employees, which it does by putting a new paragraph in Schedule 6 to the Housing Associations Act 1985. This subsection brings the powers of the corporation into line with the vast majority of other bodies and allows for administrative efficiency. Given the thousands of statutory decisions which must be taken by the corporation on a day-to-day basis, it is simply not practical for all such decisions to be taken by the board itself.
	Subsection (2) gives the corporation and Housing for Wales a retrospective power of delegation to any of its members, committees, sub-committees or employees to ensure that statutory decisions are not invalid by reason of being delegated by the board on the presumption that it had an implied power to do so. This is to remove any doubt about the validity of such decisions on the grounds that they were not taken by the board itself and essentially restores what was assumed to be the status quo.
	Subsection (3) operates to validate past decisions taken or evidenced by a document duly executed under the seal of the corporation or Housing for Wales. As I have explained, the corporation believed that it had the power from its inception to delegate and, acting on that assumption, set up delegation procedures. Although the board's delegation procedures are often well documented, in many cases it would be impossible at this stage to provide evidence to demonstrate beyond doubt that a decision which may have been taken 40 years ago was valid. To do so, it would be necessary to show that the decision in question was made by a committee of the corporation or by someone who was a member or employee at the relevant time, and to whom it was intended that the power to take the decision would be delegated. This subsection has been included to relieve the burden on third parties and the corporation to provide evidence to establish those facts. Without such a provision, uncertainty about the validity of large numbers of past decisions would remain.
	It is also intended that the clause should be broad enough to cover all eventualities: every decision where the parties have acted in good faith. So the legislation provides the certainty we require. For example, it covers instances where informal instructions were given to a member of the board to take decisions, so no formal decision to delegate was even documented. In practice we believe that this happened very rarely, if at all, but without this provision it is possible that third parties acting in good faith would be disadvantaged. To provide certainty without making provision here, either we would have to go back and look at each decision, informal or formal, to see whether it had been delegated informally or formally. Given the corporation's history, in most cases it would not be possible because records may no longer exist.
	Subsection (4) provides that where the fixing of the seal has been witnessed by any member or employee of the corporation or Housing for Wales during the period prior to this Bill, it has been properly witnessed. The previous legislation enacted in 1996 provided that the fixing of the corporation seal may be authenticated by the signature of the chairman or any other person authorised for the purpose, but it would be difficult and in some cases impossible to establish years after the event that the individual authenticating the fixing of the seal was an employee or a member at the relevant time and had in fact been authorised to take that action.
	To reiterate, the intention of these two subsections is to give complete certainty about the validity of the corporation's decisions and to draw a firm line under past decisions made by the corporation which have been duly executed under seal and authenticated by a member, employee, the corporation or Housing for Wales. It removes any doubt about their validity. Essentially, third parties can assume that any decision properly executed by the corporation under seal is valid.
	Obviously, I must stress that these subsections will not be used to validate fraudulent decisions. We are not suggesting that any such decisions have ever been made, but under Clause 1(3) decisions of the corporation must have been duly executed to have validity. Clearly decisions which were fraudulent would not have been duly executed.
	Moving on to Clause 2, this sets out the Title of the Bill and the fact that it will extend to England, Wales and Scotland in the following ways. The legislation will have effect in Wales in respect of decisions of the corporation relating to housing associations in Wales before the establishment of Housing for Wales and during the later period when the corporation's former functions were carried out by Housing for Wales. Since 1999 these functions have been carried out by the National Assembly for Wales and there is no question about the validity of such decisions. The Bill will have effect in Scotland in respect of decisions of the corporation relating to housing associations in Scotland made prior to the commencement of the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988. That Act established Scottish Homes, which took over the responsibilities of the Housing Corporation in relation to housing associations in Scotland. Those responsibilities were subsequently transferred to Communities Scotland, an agency of the Scottish Executive. On 10 May the Scottish Parliament formally approved a legislative consent motion in respect of this Bill, which allows it to apply to Scotland in the way described. The Housing Corporation has never operated in Northern Ireland and therefore the Bill does not extend there.
	Before I close, perhaps I may go over one or two of the key issues raised in the other place to provide noble Lords with reassurances and to stress that the swift progression of this Bill is the only way to rectify the situation the Housing Corporation finds itself in today. Honourable Members of opposition parties expressed worries about the retrospective nature of the legislation in the sense that it might legitimise past decisions delegated by the corporation board. I should stress that the usual concerns about legislative retrospection do not apply here. We are well aware of the potential dangers attached to retrospection and we are careful about it, in particular where the legislation imposes a penalty on individuals. But the other reason for scrutinising retrospective legislation carefully is that it is often inconsistent with the need for legal certainty and could operate against the interest of individuals in an unfair or arbitrary manner. However, this Bill does not seek to alter the rights of individuals to the benefit of some and the disadvantage of others. It does not seek to unravel transactions with unforeseeable consequences. In fact, as I have pointed out several times, the reverse is true: the Bill will establish what was thought to be the status quo and will put parties in the position they all considered they were in before the problem was discovered. It gives the Housing Corporation and stakeholders a power everyone had previously thought applied and therefore self-evidently there are no issues or additional costs arising in respect of implementation. The Bill simply ensures that those who have acted in good faith in reliance on Housing Corporation decisions are not disadvantaged.
	I turn now to the detail. Honourable Members also rightly expressed an interest in the kinds of delegated decisions of concern here. There are several types of decision. The major concern relates to Section 9 of the Housing Act 1996 which requires the consent of the corporation to be obtained by a registered social landlord for any disposal of land or housing stock under Section 8 of that Act. In most cases where a valid consent has not been obtained, the disposal would be void. A disposal includes the placing of charges on property by lenders as security against a loan. It is obviously very important to have certainty about these consents because they are significant and have important implications for the future of social housing, new build and the levels at which housing associations can borrow.
	Legal advice has assured us that in fact the effect of land registration is likely to protect purchasers and owners with an interest in land. Under the system of land registration, the fact of registration itself is the source of title, so charges registered are valid and binding unless the registrar or the court can be persuaded to rectify; namely, to amend the register following a challenge. Legal advice is that in these circumstances it is unlikely that rectification would be granted. Nevertheless, that qualified reassurance has not been sufficient to provide the sector with the certainty it requires. There remains uncertainty among those who consider that they had a valid and enforceable interest in land. The situation raised questions about decisions that could have had an important and long-term impact on the future of social housing such as, for example, the interest rate at which housing associations could borrow against assets. This could be raised to reflect the increased risk to lenders; the draw-down of loans in general terms; or the confidence that lenders might have in individual housing associations or broadly in social housing. All these things might be affected in the long term.
	I have no doubt that the noble Baronesses will agree that maintaining the confidence of the social housing sector in these long-term decisions is a very serious matter. It is essential that lenders feel that they can continue to invest; that housing associations continue to function as normal; and that tenants who depend on social housing continue to feel assured of the financial viability of their organisations. Because of the close involvement we have had with lender organisations and their representatives since the problem was discovered and because we have taken prompt action in addressing it, lenders have thus far been persuaded to take no action. They have, however, agreed to this on the condition that we legislate as soon as possible.
	I should also stress that we have closely involved not only the Housing Corporation but representatives of RSLs and the Financial Services Authority in the preparation of the legislation and they support its speedy passage.
	There are a few other areas of concern about which we need to have complete certainty. One of these is the status of other regulatory decisions taken by the corporation, such as statutory appointments to the board of an RSL which has experienced problems and is under supervision. We would not want those sorts of decisions challenged opportunistically by interested parties, particularly where an RSL is already under supervision and needs to be regulated further in the public interest.
	There are also potential concerns about housing association registration and rule changes. The corporation is responsible for registering social landlords. Registration brings them within the scope of regulation, which establishes the basis on which the social housing grant is paid to them, and the corporation must give its consent to any changes in the rules or objects of an association. For example, it might be to extend the range of activities undertaken by an association or the client groups that the association was established to serve. A failure to obtain a valid consent may call into question subsequent constitutional amendments since the initial incorporation of the RSL and the actions that had been taken were on the assumption that the rule changes were valid.
	A number of RSLs have adopted changes to include express powers in relation, for example, to lending matters, to borrowing limits, to swap powers and to powers to create floating charges. If those powers are not in place it is very difficult to be certain that loans, guarantees and hedging agreements would be valid.
	Finally, decisions made under Schedule 1 to the Housing Act 1996 to grant special determinations to the RSLs permitting them to make specific payments to staff and board members would also have a degree of uncertainty cast upon them. That, again, would leave the way open to challenge in the future.
	As I have said, in some areas of concern we can take some comfort from other legislation. I have mentioned the Land Registration Act 2002, which should provide comfort about the enforceability of transactions; and the Companies Act 1985 and the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965 might give some comfort in regard to rule changes. But having looked into this in some detail, it is clear that those provisions offer insufficient certainty and comfort whether we are talking about the associations, lenders, residents or the Housing Corporation.
	I want to be clear that we are not saying that the decisions taken by the corporation or the subsequent actions of RSLs are invalid, rather that we cannot be 100 per cent that a court would find them valid if challenged. That goes to the heart of the matter.
	One further issue that was raised in the other place concerned the review of housing and regeneration. As noble Lords will know, my department is carrying out at the moment a review of the roles of the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships. It was suggested in the other place that the Bill might be delayed until the outcome of that review was known. We have not yet made a decision about the relationship between the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships. If the two organisations were to merge, obviously we would need primary legislation. It would take time to draw that up and to take decisions about the functions that any new body would have. So we could not delay the measures without being irresponsible and having to face uncertainties about the legislation being introduced and the timing available to us.
	There is a wide-ranging consensus among all stakeholders as well as support from all parties in the other place that this Bill is the only way to solve the problem that we find ourselves in. It restores what we all believed until the end of last year to be the status quo. I am sorry to have spoken at such length but I hope that the degree of detail will reassure the noble Baronesses that the Bill does exactly what it is intended to do. I wholeheartedly commend it to the House.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Baroness Andrews.)

Baroness Maddock: My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the National Housing Federation, which represents most of the registered social landlords.
	This is probably one of the shortest Second Reading debates that I am ever likely to take part in. It was interesting to read what had happened at the other end of the Corridor, where the debate was fairly short. Its Members are not known for their brevity, whereas we are.
	As the Minister said, we are all concerned about safeguarding social housing, which is probably more important than it has ever been. When the Housing Corporation was established, its role in providing social housing was nothing like as extensive as it is now. Indeed, some people would like local authorities to have a little more freedom to provide social housing. Some rather mixed messages have been coming out of the newly designated department—someone called it "DCLoG", which is how I try to remember what it is called—the Department for Communities and Local Government. It is very confusing. During my time in this House there have been at least four names for the department.
	Social housing is very important and the Housing Corporation is its main provider. We have seen in recent years much less money being spent on social housing, and if was not for the urgency of this matter some of us might take the opportunity to debate what we might do about social housing. One of the issues I raised during Questions in the House recently was that the Government are now in receipt of £1 billion every month from stamp duty. This is not something that they envisaged they would be getting when they came into power in 1997, and I strongly believe that some of this money, which is a tax on building, should be put back into it. I know the Government argue that it is not only a matter of money but of finding the sites but the fact is that we are building fewer houses now than we have for many years, although the figure has increased a little.
	One of the other issues I would like to raise about the Housing Corporation is that, in the race to try to get the very best value for money, the corporation has looked much more at bigger bids. There was a Question last week about the Rural Housing Commission. I am aware that in my neck of the woods, if you are trying to bid to the Housing Corporation for housing in small villages and for very small schemes, it is quite difficult in this day and age because it is looking at much larger schemes. Tonight is not the time for discussing that, but I could not resist mentioning it.
	One of my questions was about how we discovered the issue. The Minister explained rather carefully how what she described as the administrative oversight was discovered. It is quite extraordinary; it was even more extraordinary that none of the people in the housing field who had been lending money on this basis picked this up. But as the Minister explained, it was an understanding and nobody thought to look at the detail in the legislation.
	It is unfortunate that this has happened. I sincerely hope that what the Government have put in place will rectify the situation. The fact that people have been co-operative, lending money and not making unnecessary waves bodes well. It is a very short Bill—22 lines long—and if it is not passed the consequences will be rather grave. As my colleague in another place said, we hope that the Bill goes through speedily—the sooner the better.

Baroness Hanham: My Lords, I thank the Minister for her detailed introduction to this short Bill and for access to her officials. They have explained the situation very clearly, which has been helpful.
	As the Minister anticipated, the immediate reaction to any proposal for retrospective legislation must be extreme caution. The Chancellor, rightly, has run into serious flak over his latest efforts to propose it to trust law. I thought that the Government had accepted the principle that legislation should be forward-looking rather than backward-looking. Therefore, there has to be a very watertight reason for even considering such a proposition. The Minister has more or less convinced me that this is a one-off situation which has to rectified and that it justifies this unusual action. I say "more or less" because I still find it quite extraordinary, as the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, said, that the original legislation establishing the Housing Corporation did not include a system of delegation, particularly as such an arrangement is clearly out of step with many other non-departmental public bodies, which appear to have such authorised delegatory powers or, as the Minister in the other place made clear, bodies which are now defunct. One wonders what would have happened to the decisions they made and whether they had the same lack of delegatory function.
	I would like to ask the Minister a question about the scheme of delegation since, if it is authorised by the Bill, it will retrospectively give proper approval to a considerable number of decisions taken over the past 40 years. In Clause 1(2), the exercise of delegation of the functions is to be taken as authorising any of the corporation's functions,
	"to any of its members, committees, sub-committees or employees".
	That would appear to give very wide delegatory powers. How is "member" defined? I presume that "members" may be members of the board, but the Bill does not say that. As the Bill stands, members might, for example, be housing associations or registered social landlords who have individually exercised the powers that we are trying to make retrospective on behalf of the Housing Corporation. If that is so, this delegatory function goes much wider than just the corporation. It is important to clarify who is a member and I would be very grateful for the Minister's explanation.
	The Housing Corporation carries out the dual role of funding and regulating registered social landlords. There was considerable discussion in the other place, which the Minister touched on, about whether this matter could have been handled without legislation. Section 9 of the Housing Act 1996 provides a general consent which would cover matters such as disposals of land and properties, but I understand that it was not wide enough to cover the regulation and regulatory and registration decisions. Perhaps the Minister could confirm that.
	It is clear that there is a dog's dinner here which must be rectified if the Housing Corporation's work is not to be seriously jeopardised and the investment programme which it has already undertaken is not to be questioned at some stage in an extremely unhelpful way.
	The Minister referred to decisions having been taken and subsection (3) of Clause 1 provides that only decisions that have been authenticated by a seal will be considered to have been covered. Is the Minister aware of any decisions that are not covered by a seal which could subsequently come back to haunt the Housing Corporation if the Bill is limited to those covered by a seal? I understand the reason behind this. It is the only visible means of ensuring that some action was taken, and I assume that that refers to property, the purchase of land, the taking out of loans and such. However, is there any area that might have slipped under, where decisions could still be around and not be covered by this extra precaution? If so, we ought to be dealing with that now so that we do not have to come back again.
	For once, I feel that the issues in the Bill were well explored in the other place. Members there did not take up the whole of their time. I have read the debate from cover to cover, which is unusual in that there was not too much to have to read. For once, they did not have to conform to a guillotine, so the scrutiny has taken place carefully there, although there may be other matters that we will need to touch on in Committee and further stages.
	We are normally suspicious of proposals that are put to us by the Government as merely administrative and resist retrospective matters, as I said. We are supportive of the Bill, as the Minister said. We accept that, on this occasion, it is a necessary piece of legislation to give confidence and security to the decisions taken and likely to be taken by the Housing Corporation in support of the social housing sector.
	I have just one other question. The Minister in the other place undertook to examine the status of delegation in other non-departmental bodies, not only those covered, as the noble Baroness said, by "DCLoG"—we are going to be stuck with that as the acronym for the new department—but on a wider basis. It was suggested that the Cabinet Office ought to examine the issue more widely to see whether this was one for other bodies. Has anything happened about that?
	We support the Bill and we do not intend to hold it up. I hope that the Minister will be able to answer the couple of questions that I have raised with her.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, I am very grateful indeed to both noble Baronesses for their responses and I will certainly answer the questions raised. The response will also send confidence and reassurance to the stakeholders and particularly to the Housing Corporation for which there is obviously so much at stake.
	I take the point about the changes that have happened in social housing since this Bill came into legislative force in 1964. We have had massive changes in the way that we provide, generate, deal with and manage social housing. Given that the same agencies have been in force, possibly no other sector has gone through such a revolution in management. It is partly a reflection of that situation that we are dealing with.
	I am sorry that the noble Baroness felt that she could not pursue the debate on social housing. We should certainly have such a debate and I would look forward to it. I will give her a few reasons why I do so. We are on course to meet our target of providing 75,000 social rented homes between 2005–06 and 2007–08 and allocated investment for 2006-08 is £3.9 billion, which is 15 per cent up on the past two years. As she said, we have been making progress and those figures reflect that. The projected creation of new affordable homes is up by 33 per cent. We hope to do more in the coming years. We have a housing challenge in this country and social housing has an important role to play in meeting that. We have worked very closely with partners at all stages since we discovered that, which I want to reiterate.
	As the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said, it is important to recognise that this is a very specific incidence of the use of retrospection. It is watertight for reasons that I have explained. It is a one-off. To answer her question, yes, "members" does indeed refer to members of the board, so it does not open the debate to anyone who could for any other reason be called a member.
	As for the Housing Corporation, the problem with Section 9 is that it deals essentially with disposal of land, as I indicated. However, there are all the bits that I mentioned that we need to secure as well. Also, it did not provide sufficient certainty for lenders, so we have gone out of our way throughout this process, with belt and braces, to put in the certainties that people wanted us to put in. The powers of delegation as they existed in 1964 were very similar to other bodies at the time, for reasons that I explained. Things have changed a lot, in the way we regulate not least, and in the forms of regulation and express determinations that we have put into legislation since then.
	All past statutory decisions are validated, those taken both under seal and not under seal. Some do not require the seal to be used. The important thing is that all decisions are validated under this Bill, but some are not taken under seal because they do not need to be. Perhaps the noble Baroness would like me to write to her with more details.